
Adafruit Founder Limor Fried: Open-Source Hardware Revolution [video] - CrankyBear
https://www.tfir.io/2019/06/04/meet-adafruit-founder-limor-fried-open-source-hardware-revolution/
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TaylorAlexander
I have so much respect for her. I tried to start an open hardware business and
even with a big successful kickstarter I couldn’t do it. I always wanted to
make great products and fun easy to follow tutorials, but I failed. Seeing her
company dominate was at first discouraging but has become cathartic. Even
though I never made those helpful products and tutorials, someone has. It
helps me feel like my failure wasn’t that bad. I’m so glad Lady Ada and her
team have been doing so well.

~~~
baybal2
I can remember a great lot of people who managed to fail even on "hello world"
level hardware businesses. Don't take this as some kind of discouragement.

The prime majority of successful small electronics businesses do very simple
things like utilitarian "bare PCB" gadgets.

Olimex for example manages to get quite a lot of business despite being quite
far away from Silicon valley's commotion (located in Plovdiv, a 350k people
town)

I knew a teen who managed to spin a simple WiFi tester on ESP32 commercially.
Also, just a PCB with a lipo battery and an MCU. He's doing great despite
amateur level EE and it being a very niche product (professional WiFi
installers are much the only buyers)

My own opinion, in electronics business you are always in between the Scylla
and Charybdis of big and unprofitable businesses (commodity OEMs,) and
niche/meme/fad products (hoverboards, vapers, and of course... the juicer)

~~~
Junk_Collector
It's a brutal space to operate in and seems to be getting worse all the time.
Investment capital is scare. Product copies are rampant and hitting the market
faster and faster to the point I even sometimes see copies reach store shelves
before the original. Suppliers are increasingly consolidated and manufacturers
can be hostile to little guys who need delivery schedules.

Anyone who finds success in such a market has my respect and the fact the
Limor has managed to not only succeed, but thrive in such an environment is a
testament to how incredible she is.

~~~
bigiain
And things move really fast underneath you.

I was part of a team who build (one batch only of) a hardware IoT product that
I'm _still_ really proud of. Our bill of materials was ~$70, maybe 50% or so
of that on our cpu/microcontroller board (the kinda standard "RaspberryPi plus
an Arduino" kind of design). By the time we failed to raise funding for a
second production run and threw in thew towel (amongst internal infighting),
we could have functionally replaced that with the at-the-time brand new
ESP8266 (this was 2013/14) for a few dollars. But we already had (expensive)
plastic injection moulds made up that fit our boards so we couldn't even
switch our insides easily.

Hardware is hard. Major respect to anyone who get it right at small scales.

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mintplant
I absolutely love Adafruit tech for low-volume hardware hacking projects.
Particularly the Feather nRF52832 [0]: onboard flash, Bluetooth Low Energy, a
5V-to-3.3V converter, and USB battery charging all in one little off-the-shelf
board. And the runtime [1] and bootloader [2] are totally open! I'm tinkering
with my own little fork to add signed updates, lock down the OTA DFU
mechanism, and switch to a more secure BLE pairing mode.

By the way, if anyone knows of an alternative to the RedBear Nano V2 [3] in
terms of form factor and power profile, please let me know, since Particle is
sadly killing that board off after buying out RedBear. Glad I don't have to
worry about that with Adafruit.

[0]
[https://www.adafruit.com/product/3406](https://www.adafruit.com/product/3406)

[1]
[https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_nRF52_Arduino](https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_nRF52_Arduino)

[2]
[https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_nRF52_Bootloader](https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_nRF52_Bootloader)

[3] [https://store.particle.io/products/redbear-
nano-v2](https://store.particle.io/products/redbear-nano-v2)

~~~
codesushi42
Have you looked into an ESP32? It has on board WiFi and Bluetooth.

~~~
mintplant
I have! Neat little chip, and I'll keep it in mind if I need WiFi in a future
project.

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jihadjihad
When I was in high school, I somehow came across her post on building an MP3
player and putting it into an Altoids tin[0]. The post was a formative
experience in my life and spurred me to pursue an engineering degree!

[0]
[http://www.ladyada.net/make/minty/index.html](http://www.ladyada.net/make/minty/index.html)

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Lowkeyloki
I love Lady Ada. But I wish I could just read this instead of having to watch
a video.

~~~
coolspot
[https://pastebin.com/sp6FaKGj](https://pastebin.com/sp6FaKGj)

~~~
frosted-flakes
This is from the "Open Transcript" option in the menu above the subscribe
button, if anyone's wondering.

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ntoll
Limor and Adafruit are an inspiration.

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bityard
More than 10 years ago now, I built myself a few x0xb0xes, one of Limor's
first projects. You could only buy the PCBs and had to source all of the other
stuff yourself. I still have one somewhere, those were fun to build and had a
great community.
[http://blog.bityard.net/category/electronics.html](http://blog.bityard.net/category/electronics.html)

Very satisfying to see how big Adafruit has become.

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burfog
When I saw "Fried", I though it was going to be about RF burns and a memorial
service.

Evidently, she's as OK as she ever was.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
And I thought "Limor" was just an alias and they typo'd "Fired", as in the
founder of Adafruit was getting fired.

~~~
anbop
She can’t be fired, she owns the company. There’s no VC in Adafruit.

