Ask HN: What can you realistically manufacture in your garage?

Hot sauce or other condiments or pastries.

Tech augmentations where you add features to a product, tear down, solder up, assemble back and QA.

> The difficulty is not in determining what's possible but rather what's profitable.

If you troll Etsy or eBay or places like that, you'll quickly begin to realize the quantity of things that are obviously made on a CNC milling machine, or a laser cutter, etc.

The customizability can be the selling point - and if you can fit everything on a trailer, you can even haul it to state fairs, town fun fests, etc.

Think those fancy wood name plates you can buy at Disneyland kind of thing. But the big advantage can be you are local instead of some online thing.

That's neat. What do you use as the source? A bank of UV LEDs?

Never really thought about that but can you get larger "flashlight" style UV-spectrum LEDs from cree/etc? Of course you need to diffuse it and fewer larger elements are harder than more smaller elements but the output power is probably higher with the big LEDs, and I seem to remember some of the alt-processes are quite insensitive (like, leave it outside in the sun for a half hour).

The other way you can do it is, of course, printing a big negative and contact printing outside. It's a little lame with film since you have to go through an interpositive to get back to a negative (unless you use positive B+W slide process or similar - but those processes aren't great either in terms of quality), but ironically those processes are now extremely accessible through digital or hybrid-digital workflows. Scan your negative, print the scan (still negative) onto a transparency, and contact print, done. Or you can take a random digital image and invert it and then print it onto a transparency.

I should give laser-transparency cyanotype a go one of these days, that would be a few fun afternoons.

On the "how do I put out enough UV light for cyanotype enlargment" thing, I wonder if there's a way to get flashbulbs to put out UV light. One of the reasons older flash photos don't have the modern digital "flash" look is because the whole flashbulb lights up, and then the reflector actually spreads out the light from the flashbulb, so you don't have a point source like the xenon tube, it's a highly diffused source. And it's actually relatively intense by modern standards - another weird niche where flashbulb still is viable is infrared photography, IR flashbulbs put out a pretty massive amount of light.

We've spent about $50k getting going, but we are on a farm so have options others don't. Our equipment was $10k, the rest went into refrigerated containers we turned into a kitchen grade dehydration space, prep room, coolroom and storage.

I'm fortunate to have a sister in the food retailing business who was our first customer. We started dehydrating lime slices to use up the excess limes from our yard and control fruit fly, and found we couldn't keep up with demand. From there it's gone really well.

We are in Australia though, YMMV.

I've always thought the way to go is take a normal controller say, and tear out the internal electronics, replace the switches if needed with stronger/better ones, and put it in a custom 3D printed housing.