During my recent trip to Dallas, TX, my friends at Texas Instruments were nice enough to arrange a meeting for me with Clint Cooley and Bob Smith at CircuitCo. CircuitCo is a contract manufacturer, who happens to be the company that manufactures TI’s ARM-basedBeagle boards.
The main focus of my visit was discussing how best for a prototyping and manufacturing company like CircuitCo to interact with the online community. There have been an increasing number of open source or amateur electronics projects that have managed to find a market large enough to overwhelm the original design’s ability to build it. CircuitCo is the perfect type of company to go to once you realize that trying to build a couple thousand of your widget on your kitchen table really sucks; they have a small scale RPM plant at their main location in Richardson, TX, but have additional manufacturing capacity outside of the United States. In addition to their manufacturing capabilities, they also offer engineering services, so even if your design isn’t quite ready to be manufactured yet, they can probably help you out.
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.