Adafruit Industries

Adafruit Industries
Industry open-source hardware
Founded 2005
Founder Limor Fried
Headquarters SoHo, Manhattan, New York City, New York, U.S.

Adafruit Industries is an open-source hardware company founded by Limor Fried in 2005.[1][2] The company designs and manufactures a number of electronics products, sells a wide variety of electronics components, tools, and accessories via its online storefront, and produces a number of learning resources, including written tutorials, introductory videos for beginners, and the longest running live video electronics show on the internet.[3] All Adafruit products are manufactured in their 40.000 sq ft factory in West SoHo Manhattan, New York City.[4] In 2013, the company took in $22 million in revenue, and had shipped over a million products in 480,000 orders.[5] On January 27th, at 10:49:52, the company accepted its 1 000 000th order.[6]

The name Adafruit comes from Fried's online moniker "ladyada", itself a homage to computer science pioneer Ada Lovelace. The company's goal is to get more people involved in technology, science and engineering. [7] Project kits are designed to deliver practical outcomes not academic exercises and encourage more women into the field.[8]

History

Limor Fried began selling electronic kits on her website for her own designs in 2005. She later moved to New York City to found Adafruit Industries.[9] In 2010 Adafruit offered a $1000 reward for whoever could hack Microsoft's Kinect to make its motion sensing capabilities available for use for other projects. This reward was increased to $2,000 and then $3000 following Microsoft's concerns about tampering.[10][11][12] In 2013 the company made $22 million in revenue, and by 2014 had increased to $33 million.[4]

Products

In addition to distributing third party components and boards such as the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi, Adafruit develops and sells its own development boards for educational and hobbyist purposes. In 2016, the company released the Circuit Playground, a board with an Atmel ATmega32u4 microcontroller and a variety of sensors.[13] It, like many Adafruit productions, is circular in shape for ease of use in wearable electronic projects,[14] along with the FLORA, the companies official wearable electronics development platform.[15] Becky Stern hosts a weekly web show dedicated to wearable electronics for Adafruit on their YouTube channel.[16]

NeoPixel

NeoPixel is Adafruit's brand of individually-addressable RGB LED. They are based on the WS2812 LED and WS2811 driver, where the WS2811 is integrated into the LED, for reduced footprint. Adafruit manufactures several products with NeoPixels with form factors such as strips, rings, matrices, Arduino shields, traditional 5mm cylinder LED and individual NeoPixel with or without a PCB. The control protocol for the NeoPixels is based on only one communication wire. Adafruit provides an Arduino library to help with the programming of NeoPixels. [17]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "About Adafruit". Retrieved February 22, 2015.
  2. ↑ "Entrepreneur of 2012: Limor Fried". Retrieved February 22, 2015.
  3. ↑ "An interview with Limor Fried, Founder at Adafruit". Retrieved February 22, 2015.
  4. 1 2 "How one woman turned her passion for tinkering into a $33 million business — without a dime of funding". Tech Insider. Retrieved 2015-11-23.
  5. ↑ "Women Entrepreneurs to Bet On". Retrieved February 22, 2015.
  6. ↑ https://blog.adafruit.com/2016/01/27/1-million-thanks-celebrating-1000000-orders-adafruit-thank-you-makerbusiness/
  7. ↑ "How DIY Electronics Startup Adafruit Industries Became a Multimillion-Dollar Company - IEEE - The Institute". theinstitute.ieee.org. Retrieved 2015-11-23.
  8. ↑ "How one woman turned her passion for tinkering into a $33 million business — without a dime of funding". Tech Insider. Retrieved 2015-11-23.
  9. ↑ "How one woman turned her passion for tinkering into a $33 million business — without a dime of funding". Tech Insider. Retrieved 2015-11-23.
  10. ↑ "Kinect Hack Makes Microsoft Angry, Deny its Existence". PCWorld. Retrieved 2015-11-23.
  11. ↑ "Bounty offered for open-source Kinect driver". cnet.com. Retrieved 9 December 2015.
  12. ↑ "$2,000 Bounty Put on Open-Source Kinect Drivers". wired.com. Retrieved 9 December 2015.
  13. ↑ "Adafruit Unveils New Circuit Playground Board To Learn About Electronics - Geeky Gadgets". Geeky Gadgets. Retrieved 2016-01-16.
  14. ↑ "Adafruit's best open source wearables of 2015". Opensource.com. Retrieved 2016-01-16.
  15. ↑ "FLORA : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits". www.adafruit.com. Retrieved 2016-01-16.
  16. ↑ "Becky Stern : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits". www.adafruit.com. Retrieved 2016-01-16.
  17. ↑ https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neopixel-uberguide/overview

External links


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