Adafruit also illustrates how a good part of this new manufacturing operates through open-source sharing and what can be called social tinkering, in contrast with the manufacturing of the past, which emphasized patents, trade secrets and proprietary invention. Fried got the idea for such a company when, as a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab, she began making simple MP3 players and cellphone jammers, just for nerdy kicks, and made the recipes for her creations — CAD files, software, mechanical drawings — public on her blog. Requests poured in for kits that would allow people to make what she designed, and Adafruit was born.
Today Adafruit remains an open-source company. It publicizes how its kits are made, so that you can clone them, and also reveals how it runs as a business. The company says which Internet service provider it uses, which shipping company, which software runs its online shopping system. Torrone told me that they share this information so that other companies, including rivals, can cut to the chase of genuine discovery and not get bogged down reinventing wheels.
Nice Adafruit mention & congrats to our friend Ayah Bdeir!
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
