This is big news! Our Ladyada, Limor Fried, was selected to join President Obama in a Fireside Hangout this Thursday 2/14 at 4:50pm EST on Google+! We’ll discuss issues that are top of mind for citizens, and we’d love you all to help shape this conversation. Submit your questions to youtube.com/whitehouse and the President will answer questions that are voted to the top.
Limor will be talking to the President LIVE about manufacturing and education!
Don’t forget to RSVP here for a reminder to tune in on Thursday- http://goo.gl/7pxfM.
Chinese New Year is the most important of the traditional Chinese holidays. In China, it is also known as the Spring Festival, the literal translation of the modern Chinese name. Chinese New Year celebrations traditionally ran from Chinese New Year’s Day itself, the first day of the first month of the Chinese calendar, to the Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the first month, making the festival the longest in the Chinese calendar. Because theChinese calendar is lunisolar, the Chinese New Year is often referred to as the “Lunar New Year”.
Within China, regional customs and traditions concerning the celebration of the Chinese new year vary widely. Often, the evening preceding Chinese New Year’s Day is an occasion for Chinese families to gather for the annualreunion dinner. It is also traditional for every family to thoroughly cleanse the house, in order to sweep away any ill-fortune and to make way for good incoming luck. Windows and doors will be decorated with red colour paper-cuts and couplets with popular themes of “good fortune” or “happiness”, “wealth”, and “longevity.” Other activities include lighting firecrackers and giving money in red paper envelopes.
UPS is closely monitoring Winter Storm Nemo as it approaches the Northeast, with blizzard warnings in effect from Northern New Jersey to Coastal Maine. We have contingency plans in place to ensure the safety of our employees and to minimize the storm’s impact on pickups and deliveries.
No pickups, deliveries, or On-Call Pickup® service are available in the ZIP Codes listed below.
Love Flora but want a bite-sized version? Look no further, Gemma is a tiny wearable platform board with a lot of might in a 1″ diameter package. Powered by a Attiny85 and programmable with an Arduino IDE over USB, you’ll be able to realize any wearable project!
Gemma is still wrapping up development, sign up to get first crack when Gemma is released.
Powered by the ATtiny85 with 3 available I/O pins, one of which is also an analog input and two which can do PWM output
Progammable over the micro USB connection
Onboard 3.3v Regulator and power LED
Reset button
Works with our Flora NeoPixels (can drive about a dozen – not much RAM!)
Super tiny design, only 1″ (25mm) diameter & 4mm thick
The Raspberry Pi® is a single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. The design is based around a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor, VideoCore IV GPU, and 128 or 256 Megabytes of RAM. The design does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, instead relying on an SD card for booting and long-term storage. This board is intended to run Linux kernel based operating systems.
This is the Raspberry Pi Model B 512MB RAM model with two USB ports and a 10/100 Ethernet controller. Please note some boards are made in the UK, some in China. WE DO NOT KNOW IN ADVANCE WHICH ONES YOU MAY RECEIVE!
As typical of modern computers, generic USB keyboards and mice are compatible with the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi use Linux-kernel based operating systems. The Raspberry Pi does not come with a real-time clock, so an OS must use a network time server, or ask the user for time information at boot time to get access to time and date info for file time and date stamping. However a real time clock (such as the DS1307) with battery backup can be easily added via the I2C interface.
Raspberry Pi® is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Adafruit is a proud donor to the Raspberry Pi Foundation!
We have a limit of 10 per customer, but if you buy 9 you’ll get one free since we’re still keeping our FREE Pi for orders over $350 special.The $350 does not include shipping and this is just for online customers (not resellers/distributors/hackerspaces or purchase orders).
Here are the Circuit Playground plushies, we have a lot of things planned with the cute components, from teaching “props” to special projects to puppet versions for our upcoming kid’s show. Most of all we know it’s hard to figure exactly what will spark a young mind on to the journey towards science, technology, engineering, art, math and more – we wish we had these when were young We’re waiting on the blue LED ones to arrive in a week or so (Billie) she’s always late, but shows up dressed to glow
For 2012 the Adafruit site clocked in over 55 million page views and over 16 million visitors. An interesting note, 2 million of the page views already came from our new learning system http://learn.adafruit.com !
Ladyada was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year by Entrepreneur Magazine today! Thank you everyone in the maker, open-source, hacker, artist, engineer and designer community who nominated and voted for Ladyada Entrepreneur of the Year, from the beginning of the process, the nomination and the finals, it all took us by surprise. The fantastic folks nominated all have amazing companies, causes and efforts, we’re trilled to be included with them. Thank you!
The magazine’s Entrepreneur of 2012, Limor Fried, founded Adafruit Industries in 2005 and through it, is educating and inspiring the next generation of engineers and scientists. The open-source hardware and electronics company not only designs a catalog full of cool tech products that clients can order–it gives away the step-by-step instructions and tutorials for them to learn how to do so themselves. Fried’s new badging system also makes learning exciting for kids, by rewarding them for mastering new tech-savvy skills, and furthers the educational mission of Adafruit Industries.
FAVE QUOTE:“We are what we celebrate.” —entrepreneur and inventor Dean Kamen
WORDS OF WISDOM:“Be the change. If you want to live in a world that looks a certain way, don’t wait around for someone else to do it.” —business partner Phil Torrone
ENTREPRENEURIAL IDOL: Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, publisher of countless maker-friendly magazines and books
BIGGEST MOTIVATOR: Feedback that Adafruit is inspiring the next generation of engineers
DESIGN INSPIRATION: New York City
Previous profile here, and here’s a preview of the article January 2013: Feature: Entrepreneur of the Yearhere. And an interview “Magazine names hacker Limor Fried ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’” on CNET here.
With this award comes great expectations and responsibilities for all of us at Adafruit to keep doing a good for our community, customers and for our team. Thank you everyone for all the support.
NEW PRODUCT – Adafruit NeoPixel Digital RGB LED Weatherproof Strip 60 LEDs – 1 meter. You thought it couldn’t get better than our world-famous 32-LED-per-meter Digital LED strip but we will prove you wrong! You wanted twice the LEDs? We got it (well, its 1.875 times as many but that’s within a margin of error). You wanted thinner strips? Now only 12.5 mm wide, 10 mm if you remove the strip from the casing. You wanted less noticeable strip color – this strip has white-colored flex PCB, which will be less visible against white-painted walls.
All your dreams answered, yet there are a few things to watch for.
First up, the higher density means much higher power usage over a certain distance – 18 Watts max (~3.5 Amps @ 5V) per meter instead of 9.6 Watts max (~2 Amps @ 5V). The max rating is assuming all the LEDs are on full white, usually the actual current for colorful design is about 1/3 to 1/2 the max current. A good power supply such as our 5V 10A supply is key!
Second, to get high density, the controller chip is inside the LED, which is kind of cool, but also means that the chip only uses a single pin for input and a single pin for output. The protocol used is very very timing-specific and can only be controlled by microcontrollers with highly repeatable 100nS timing precision. We have example code for using with the Arduino Uno/Mega microcontroller at 8MHz and 16MHz, but it will not work with the Raspberry Pi, Basic Stamp, NETduino, any other interpreted/virtual machine microprocessor or any processor slower than 8 MHz. For those processors, check our 32 LED/meter digital LED strip which has SPI-like input/output and works well with Pi, NETduino, and other processors.
Third, just because you have all those pixels doesn’t mean you have the RAM for it – the entire strip must be buffered in memory, and we’ve found many Arduino UNO projects only have about 400bytes of RAM available after all the extras are included – enough for about 135 LED pixels. If you want to drive the entire strip and have some other libraries included, use a Mega.
These LED strips are even more fun and glowy. There are 60 RGB LEDs per meter, and you can control each LED individually! Yes, that’s right, this is the digitally-addressable type of LED strip. You can set the color of each LED’s red, green and blue component with 8-bit PWM precision (so 24-bit color per pixel). The LEDs are controlled by shift-registers that are chained up down the strip so you can shorten or lengthen the strip. Only 1 digital output pin are required to send data down. The PWM is built into each LED-chip so once you set the color you can stop talking to the strip and it will continue to PWM all the LEDs for you
The strip is made of flexible PCB material, and comes with a weatherproof sheathing.
You can cut this stuff pretty easily with wire cutters, there are cut-lines every 0.65″/1.7cm (1 LED each). Solder to the 0.1″ copper pads and you’re good to go. Of course, you can also connect strips together to make them longer, just watch how much current you need! We have a 5V/2A supply that should be able to drive 1 meter (depending on use) and a 5V/10A supply that can drive up to 4 meters (depending on use) You must use a 5V DC power supply to power these strips, do not use higher than 6V or you can destroy the entire strip
They come in 4 meter reels with a 2-pin JST SM connector on each end and separated power/ground wires. These strips are sold by the meter! If you buy 4 meters at a time, you’ll get full reels with two connectors. If you buy less than 4m, you’ll get a single strip, but it will be a cut piece from a reel which may or may not have a connector on it.
To wire up these strips we suggest picking up some JST SM plug and receptacle cables.
If you’ve used Circuit Playground or seen any of my Makevideos, then you’re familiar with my work. If you’re familiar with my work then it’s kind of like you know me – so no introductions necessary. btw – Great to see ya, howya been?
Adafruit’s kits & tutorials played a big part in my introduction to the world of creative electronics and subsequent technological adventure-journey which I continue on today. I’m proud to tell you that I’ll now be helping Adafruit do the same for many others.
As Creative Engineer here at Adafruit, I’ll be wearing a few different hats – including a classy software development bowler as well as a sweet video production helmet (ooh – note to self – make video helmet). Also a magnifying visor for soldering. because they’re awesome.
In any case, we have much good things to come – so expect to see me popping up quite a bit around these parts.
Hi, I’m johngineer, and this is my 971st blog post (!) here on Adafruit. I’ve been doing this blog thing for quite some time, but this post marks a new milestone — it’s my first post as a full-time employee.
Specifically, I’m the new Director of Imaging, which means I’ll be working on all the photography that we share with the world to make it the best that it can be. I’ll be shooting behind-the-scenes photos and videos too, new product images, and all kinds of other stuff.
I’m also on the technical staff, so I’ll be working on new hardware designs with LadyAda, continuing my work on the Fritzing library, making cool projects, and generally doing fun technical work that (hopefully) wins hearts and minds.
[John will be on Ask an Engineer this weekend too!]
In this lesson, you will be start of using the Serial Monitor to display analog readings, and then extend the project using eight LEDs from lesson 4, so that you can control the number of LEDs that are lit by turning the knob on a variable resistor.
Well howdy. I’m Molly (Rae), newly minted COO for Adafruit. I’m just starting to get my hands dirty with DIY electronics and am super excited to be working with the smartest, most enthusiastic do-ers I’ve ever met.
I’m coming at Adafruit from a building angle, so I’m here learning the basics along with a lot of you. I’m a building systems nerd, and HVAC systems are a little harder to generate from my teeny-tiny Brooklyn apartment. Besides buildings, I’m a night photography enthusiast. Here’s a 30-second exposure shot I took from when lower Manhattan was shot into the dark ages. It looks deceptively light…actually the only sources are from passing cars on the Bowery and candlelight from the restaurant to the left. The hurricane and blackout makes me especially excited (and grateful) to work at Adafruit where we have cell phone charge and internet come hell or high water (of course, if the entire grid collapses there will be trouble even for us…)
I also love open ocean swimming, so if any of you can come with a sonographic, waterproof compass that alerts me when I’m swimming off course, I would greatly appreciate it! Here’s me after hiking up an active volcano in the temperate rainforests of South America (near Pucon, Chile, to be specific):
I will be managing a lot of operations and behind-the-scenes stuff at Adafruit but expect to see me popping in and out of the blog from time to time!
Printable catalog (PDF)
We’re waiting on the blue LED ones to arrive in a week or so (Billie) she’s always late, but shows up dressed to glow 
FEED
