
Limor Fried’s Artful Electronics - dcschelt
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/limor-frieds-artful-electronics?intcid=mod-latest
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JeremyMorgan
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.

~~~
officialchicken
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.

~~~
JeremyMorgan
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.

~~~
officialchicken
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!

~~~
petra
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?

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officialchicken
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode_and_effects_analysis)
[2]
[http://www.fda.gov/medicaldevices/deviceregulationandguidanc...](http://www.fda.gov/medicaldevices/deviceregulationandguidance/postmarketrequirements/qualitysystemsregulations/)

Edit: add claims in parens [3]
[http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/ResourcesforYou/Industry/u...](http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/ResourcesforYou/Industry/ucm111124.htm)

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

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generj
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.

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noonespecial
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.

~~~
ghaff
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?

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tptacek
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.

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bunkydoo
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 :)

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patja
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.

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n00b101
> 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.

~~~
esmi
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.

~~~
Hydraulix989
We didn't even have these proper things at my top engineering university --
just a bunch of Wellers on a bench.

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koz1000
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.

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pepijndevos
> “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.

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camillomiller
"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

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rflrob
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?

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gruturo
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.

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

