As someone else commented, this is one of the reasons why trusting companies like Apple is a bad idea. Even if employees had real concerns about a technology, or wanted to discuss the pros/cons, we would never hear about it. It should be obvious why a strong focus on secrecy and "controlling the message" breeds distrust.
Please don't use the term open source, not even in quotes, if your code is not available under a license that meets the Open Source Definition or the Free Software Definition.
One thing others don't seem to have mentioned: While you can do this with any qPCR machine, you would not be allowed to actually use a random qPCR machine for medical testing. You need a special qPCR machine which is installed by the company, then run through a calibration procedure "certify-in-place" which is invalidated if the machine is moved. There is currently a waiting list to buy one of these machines (at least in the U.S.) and they are much more expensive than normal qPCR machines.
If you aren't worried about safety then you can use e.g. a full bridge rectifier hooked up to 110 V AC to get a usable (but shitty) agarose gel power supply. I really don't recommend this but it does show how easy it can be.
Yes! To expand on this a bit, disaster.radio locally hosts web apps, e.g. a vector tile map of the local area, and serves them up over WiFi to local devices with a reasonable bandwidth, then uses the very low bandwidth of LoRa to share points on the map added by users over long distances (e.g. where you can get water, food, etc).
disaster.radio is not a replacement to a existing internet infrastructure like NYC Mesh. Setting up a high bandwidth mesh network is a lot of work. Each node needs a non-trivial amount of power (enough to make solar hard) and nodes generally need line of sight which requires good mounting locations and planning.
We, the creators of disaster.radio, actually also run a small wifi-based mesh network https://peoplesopen.net/ and the idea for disaster.radio came out of frustration with difficulty of mounting wifi nodes (finding interested people in good locations, then negotiating with landlords for permission to mount on rooftops and running ethernet cable for PoE into building, then finding another location within line of sight and repeating the process). We thought: What if we could make a "mesh throwie" where installation was as easy as throwing it on a roof (and maybe strapping it to something).
Hi. Thanks! Some of our contributors have added support for some of the off-the-shelf TTGO ESP32 + LoRa boards but I'm not sure we're ready to call it stable. I'll ping them to come here and answer your question. The previous ESP8266-based solution was just a bit under-powered for serving up the vector tile maps and we're not supporting that anymore.
We're also about to finalize some new custom boards with ESP32 and two LoRa modules (meshing on a single channel kinda sucks) and will make an announcement on our site as soon as that's ready to try out.
Yay! I'm one of the devs on disaster.radio and we're big fans. We're actually having our weekly meeting at our hackerspace sudo room https://sudoroom.org/ in Oakland, CA right now and listening to your track Drop The Bomb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0S-HOOp_VY which has been something of an unofficial theme song for us!
omg <3 <3!! I gotta play in Oakland one day, I've never been but I have met way too many hilarious wonderful kooks living out there.. PS new disasteradio album is less about post-apocalypse and more an equal mix of solarpunk and SYNTHESIZER TRANSMISSIONS FROM THE TEMPORAL VOID
