- A DIY microfluidics and photolithography pipeline is being prototyped: Sylgard 184 silicone elastomer is being sourced for soft-lithography, UV-LED arrays or projector-plus-microscope rigs are being evaluated for patterning, and the goal is to stay under a $2 k–$4 k budget instead of purchasing a $6 k commercial system.

- A new YAML-based “Structured Knowledge Database” (SKDB) is under active development to encode every industrial process, part, and machine in a machine-readable format; early examples include hall-heroult.process, screw.yaml, and blockhole.yaml, and the vision is an apt-get-like command that can compute the shortest manufacturing path from any inventory list to any desired product.

- The SKDB toolchain is being built on an open-source CAD/CAM stack—Open CASCADE, pythonOCC, and HeeksCAD—with mirrored documentation at http://adl.serveftp.org/lab/opencascade/ and a new Python module “pymates” that performs geometric interference and tolerance checks to ensure mating parts actually fit.

- A web front-end called “djangit” (a git-backed Django wiki) is proposed so non-git users can collaboratively edit process and part descriptions, while GNU Units integration enforces dimensional consistency and prevents mismatched pressure ratings or other unit errors.

- Retrosynthetic-analysis concepts from chemistry are being generalized to all manufacturing: evolutionary algorithms and graph-grammar techniques (GraphSynth, igraph) are being explored to mutate and recombine process networks, inspired by a University of Texas project that automatically designs 30 %-efficient gear trains in two minutes.

- A debate over fab-lab costs concluded that a “standard” MIT-style Fab Lab package is ~$100 k, but participants believe a functional bio/chem/fab lab can be built for ~$10 k, with a long-term budget of ~$400 k envisioned for a full facility plus beach house and space-launch capability.

- Open-source biology tools discussed include webcam-based microscopes, DIY DNA purification protocols (cells + CHAPS → centrifuge), open FPLC controllers to replace proprietary protein-purification hardware, and CD-style microfluidic chips for low-cost protein separation.

- “Pink Army” (pinkarmy.org) was highlighted as an open-source, personalized anti-cancer therapeutics hardware start-up, illustrating the broader goal of SKDB to support ventures in DIYbio, open-source medicine, and distributed manufacturing.

- A missing “free electronic blueprint repository” was identified as a critical gap; existing offerings like Liquidware were deemed inadequate, reinforcing the need for SKDB to become a comprehensive open-hardware parts database.

- Ongoing community tasks include transcribing ~150 industrial processes from a reference textbook into the YAML schema (about 10 completed so far), downloading a batch of PubMed papers for shared access, and setting up distributed mirroring via the Michigan “flows-dev” project to replace ad-hoc cron-based mirrors.