Limor Fried’s Artful Electronics | Hacker News Reader

Limor Fried’s Artful Electronics

newyorker.com

155 pointsdcschelt29 comments

One person can make a difference. Her company is a driving force in IoT, pushing it forward like few others. Adafruit provides improved designs, with thorough instruction and lots of software. Can't say enough good things about Limor and Adafruit.

It's not just IoT - it's the entire product development ecosystem. Usually a prototype for an idea involves hardware, firmware, and software. You can tinker, or you can go into production complete with FCC badges - and never really leave the adafruit.com site. Not too long ago these prototyping (evaluation) tools and circuits were prohibitively expensive. And the information hard to find.

She's awesome and true to every sense of rainbow ribbon cable'd single sided tin-can hacking.

Agreed. I didn't get into electronics as heavy years ago because of cost and lack of solid information, and this site has changed that for me.

I also messed with electronics since I was a kid with 100-in-1 kits from radio shack, but several years ago adafruit, sparkfun, eevblog, hackaday, and seeedstudio (Bunnie) helped provide me with the background info and fun hacker on-my-own-time-projects I eventually required to help build serious real world products - the kind surgeons use today and required approval from both the FDA and FCC.

Thanks to all of them! And happy hacking!

As someone who worked with the fda, do you think there could be some pre certified framework that greatly reduces the work and the certification burden of medical product developers?

Just ignore the enormous risk or cost. Or how the EU does it (only slightly faster) for one moment.

Given that you, the creator, define the risk (dMFEA [1]) AND the "quality system" [2] (which is actually a process and has little to do with QA from a software definition or understanding), my guess is that the entire system for approved devices, drugs, and their requisite clinical trials has evolved for the big guys to eat the medium guys and prevent the small guys from even entering the competition. The final nail in the coffin is that there is ABSOLUTELY NO 3rd party risk or security analysis at any time or level - only what you say, document, and submit (claims [3]). They are only involved once there's a lawsuit - and every piece of documentation by the creator is "burden of proof" than the accuser must disprove. Now imagine a 10,000 patient study - how do you prove the drug was bad because it, e.g. blinded one person?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode_and_effects_analy... [2] http://www.fda.gov/medicaldevices/deviceregulationandguidanc...

Edit: add claims in parens [3] http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/ResourcesforYou/Industry/u...

Edit 2: Short answer, no. But there may be hope for simple pure-software app developers: http://www.fda.gov/downloads/MedicalDevices/.../UCM263366.pd...

It's also true that we entered into this period after simple ICs plus some wire and analog components (or Heathkit) let you do interesting things when you started to need a lot of expensive gear to do interesting hardware. That's still true in some cases. But gear like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis (and BLE devices etc.) once again let you do practical but interesting things at home.

That's right. The site has tons of information. The info blurb about each product is actually informative and seems written by someone who actually knows a thing or two about that item.

Tutorials? Yup. Manufacturer spec sheets? Yup. Libraries for various gizmos, hosted in GitHub? Yup. Forum where you actually get answers? Yup.

"The info blurb about each product is actually informative and seems written by someone who actually knows a thing or two about that item."

...and writes in a style that is understandable by someone who knows nothing about the item.

That's the key differentiator.

I recently bought a Windows 10 IoT kit from Adafruit. I've since purchased three more packs of different electronic components from them. It's been great. I'm really pleased with them.

It's impressive to see how involved she remains in the details of Adafruit given how large the company has become.

I mean, she's CEO of a company with 30 million plus in revenue, but still is up at 3am to do a product launch video on Youtube for the Raspberry Pi 3!

And on every product video, as well as an impressive quantity of the project pages.

I love Sparkfun too, but Nate has increasingly disappeared from the front lines as time has gone on.

Adafruit is the true spiritual successor to Radio Shack. In an alternate world (where people of "influence" are very much unlike they are in ours), the management of RS would have turned the whole mess over to Limor. I think she could have saved it.

It's also the case that, by the time there was a problem, RS was so heavily invested in real estate that it would have hard to have shifted gears. Even today, "maker spaces" are mostly pretty informal and don't exist in suburban shopping malls.

And, honestly, why should one care about "saving" RS if there are spiritual successors that are a better match for what people are looking for today? Why deal with the costs of a legacy company?

ghaff gave an accurate and correct and very theoretical argument.

As a practical argument, when adafruit gets written up as a business case study, it going to be all about the online. I've ordered lots of stuff from there and fulfillment and stocking levels is about average, lets be nice and call it above average. I've never had the slightest problem although items are sometimes out of stock awhile and shipment is faster than a mom and pop but its nowhere near amazon levels of fulfillment and it has nothing on walmart style brick and mortar.

Sticking to core competencies would not imply opening brick and mortar or even worse taking over a dying chain of brick and mortar.

What could have worked would have been very superficial, like buying the IP rights to the name. Such as www.radioshack.com web redirects to adafruit. Or maybe a cross exchange such that radio shack part number 276-1617 is this adafruit part number 1234 which is a 2n2222 NPN transistor, etc.

Limor is so great, and I am over the moon that she's getting recognized for it. Congratulations!

Both my teenage kids are STEM-inclined, and it rules having examples like her to point to for where they could end up.

There's just something I love about adafruit. Probably the design of the site and it's ease of use. Then the selection of products is just phenomenal! Keep up the great work, Limor - good to see someone like you getting much deserved recognition :)

This looks like a great device for the classroom. Soldering just isn't practical in the classroom (at least where I teach, middle school) and breadboarding would be just barely workable, but this with all of the built in hardware and easy alligator clip pads for extending it, could work very well. Depending on the price.

> Soldering just isn't practical in the classroom (at least where I teach, middle school)

Really? I had wood shop in (public) middle school, I'm talking about a room full of 13 year olds with industrial sized band saws, tables saws and volatile chemicals. And that was somehow ok (once in a while the teacher would hit the kill switch if he saw someone horsing around). Soldering is like knitting compared to that. I don't see the problem.

Also not sure why you think breadboarding is barely workable, it seems totally workable to me.

Limiting students to alligator clips and "built in hardware" seems like short changing them. I suppose it's better than nothing.

Anyway, Lady Ada and Adafruit are really awesome. If you are doing something for schools, I would contact them directly and let them know.

Indeed, my kids soldered in one of their middle school classes.

Keep in mind a proper solder station has things like fume extraction, hazard waste disposal, anti-static pads, etc. etc. In short, I can think of reasons why a proper station is not practical for a given middle school.

But I definitely agree with your breadboarding point and overall sentiment. In college I recall a series of labs that built a fairly workable 4-bit computer on breadboards. They're very workable, even preferable, for the right type of circuit/project.

We didn't even have these proper things at my top engineering university -- just a bunch of Wellers on a bench.

I was recently prototyping a commercial project with an IL9341 LCD driver, a common part that my LCD glass vendor used in their modules. I asked the glass vendor for a development unit that had a wired-up interface and available schematics - they didn't have one. Perhaps they could find one in China in a few weeks, once everyone returned from the New Year's celebrations.

Adafruit had a usable unit in stock, with full schematics, and it was on my desk in 36 hours.

> “I try to spend about half my time doing engineering,” she told me. Frequently, she broadcasts that process on Twitch, a live-streaming site, narrating the decisions that go into placing each capacitor and orienting each pin.

The most interesting part of the article IMO. I want to see her design and build products. I assume this is the stream they are referring to? There are some #deskofladyada videos, but not actual product design AFAICT.

"Ivan Lermolieff, an anagram of his own name, [Giovanni Morelli]"

Anagram? What? Two letters are missing... This is the New Yorker, how can such a wrong statement pass review?

Btw, Limor is a superstar, she's great and deserves every inch of her success

It's a tiny point and not, I'll be the first to admit, closely related to the article, but how is Ivan Lermolieff an anagram of Giovanni Morelli? Where does the G go, and where do the Fs come from?

I'm quite peeved as well. I tried alternate, creative, latin-y spellings (josef, ioannes, etc), hit wordsmith.org too for some bruteforce help, no way.

It's an anagram and then he also "Russianized" it apparently, adding the -ff as what we now mostly transliterate as -ov.

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