“Learning electronics” skill badges from Adafruit Industries

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“Learning electronics” skill badges from Adafruit Industries – In a week or so we will be including “learning electronics” skill badges in some of our kits & tool packs at Adafruit Industries. The first one is “learning to solder” – if you’re new to electronics, we’ll have a special bundle of tools, a kit and limited edition “badge” to show the world you’re proficient in soldering, once you complete the tutorials and kit that is!

We will have a variety of badges, the first is soldering – others include:

  • Arduino
  • LEDs (with conductive thread & real LED!)
  • Open source hardware
  • TV-B-Gone’ing
  • Reverse engineering
  • Dumpster diving
  • Laser cutting
  • WaveBubble 🙂

Our badges are made in the USA!

“Merit (or skill) badges” have a rich history as well as some modern adaptations. Let’s take a look!


Pt 1810
Over the last few years there have been some amazing “badges” – the first ones that caught our eyes were the Science scout badges “ORDER OF THE SCIENCE SCOUTS OF EXEMPLARY REPUTE AND ABOVE AVERAGE PHYSIQUE” from The Science Creative Quarterly.


Joystiq Meritbadge
Video game merit badges “Video game merit badges; Tetris is the new archery”… Part of a Worth 1000 photoshop contest.


Pt 1811
Next up, “Nerd merit badges“…. Inbox zero and open source!


Eer3A-Uniform
And lastly, the merit badges from the Girl & Boy scouts. Decades of history, recently the big news online was about one scout earning all 121 badges.


Pt 1812
There’s also a great “spoof” merit badge store online!


Excited? Stop back here next week for more details on the Adafruit badges! As we complete each badge we are releasing the artwork with Creative Common licensing so others can create badges too – this project is by Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone.


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11 Comments

  1. genius . . . . I remember earning these in the old school way. Have to see if I can quality for anything new.

  2. YES!!!!

    i hope we will be able to purchase these individually? i have completed a fair number of the kits you sell!

  3. way to go, ladyada and crew!

  4. I would definitely buy some of these, but like Frenzy said, without the kits because some of us already “earned” the right to wear them :p

  5. This is truly wonderful. I may have to earn some of these!

  6. Love it! I’ve got some from Machine Project on my bag pictured here:http://www.flickr.com/photos/edgar/3344687968/

  7. One hopes for merit badges that are just a little bit larger than the Arduino Lilypad, eh? 🙂

  8. I was wondering if you could post where you had these made? I’d love to get some made myself.

    Thanks!

  9. You can have them made at any embroidery shop, but you’d be better off to find one with an in-house digitizer if you want the best artistic control. The quality of the digitizing on the soldering badge is good, but I’d really suggest to your embroiderer that they stitch these applique-style on Super-Solvy or some other dissolving badge film so that you can have a clean edge. Either that or go with a company that has a merrowing machine– that’s the sewing machine that produces the classic finished patch edge. It would really improve your product. If you want a consult from a geek/award-winning embroidery digitizer, shoot me an email.

  10. @Erich wow, you are very generous & savvy! We did ask for them to merrow it but the shop didn’t own a machines. This is our ‘first run’ and we’re going to see how it goes. We’re learning a lot about patches, digitization, threads, materials, blanks, coverage, etc and will constantly improve our patch design

  11. That is soooo cooooool!!! I want one.

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