Thank you for this. I was going nuts trying to figure out where I had read this before. Peace and love! For the uninitiated, the Neil Stephenson novel, "Anathem", is brilliant and extremely entertaining.
Why not target the enthusiast first? The buzz created around something interesting an "amateur" cooked up may be what you need. The investment involved with creating dev hardware should be minimal, correct?
I may be wrong, but from few other enthusiast niches I conclude, enthusiasts number is very little to feed hardware development.
- Need millions sells, but really most real project have made thousands sells.
And this is long known - even Raspberry born for other market, fortunately, was not just killed but conversed to target enthusiast and even now incomplete project.
This is the repo of the visualization software he demo'd. Not sure how accessible it would be to run locally, but I saw the demo in person and it was pretty cool: https://github.com/dollabs/planviz