Interview: Ask Limor Fried About Open-Source Hardware and Adafruit 139
With her signature pink hair, MIT engineer Limor Fried has become a force in the maker movement. Last year she was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year by Entrepreneur Magazine, and her company, Adafruit Industries, did $10 million in sales. Limor has agreed to take some time away from soldering and running a new company to answer your questions about hardware, electronics, and Adafruit. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
Synergies (Score:3, Interesting)
Every community has tinkerers, I think you'd agree. We all have that friend with a garage full of tools and a workbench, and whenever something breaks and needs fixing, we go to him/her. I do believe you, along with other entrepreneurs, have given people unprecidented access to robotics and automation tools at a very low cost, and this opens many doors for these jack of all trades types to build replacement parts. Combined with 3D printers, I can imagine these people building all kinds of things to fix broken equipment, or fill a niche need, in their communities.
But there is one hold-up to these technologies having a happy and fruitful marriage: Copyright. Specificially, that once we have all this equipment, we're going to need a catalog, a google of sorts, to get blueprints and construction materials from. We had thick ACME Electronics parts catalogues in the 90s, but today there doesn't really seem to be that kind of centralized one-stop access to large numbers of blueprints for these tools you've created.
With that background stated, what, if any plans, do you have to start addressing this need within your emerging market?
wearable computing (Score:5, Interesting)
EE or MBA? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been a follower of your youtube channel for years. I've watched Adifruit grow from a little corner of your apt to a $10mill company.
I loved the old school hacking vids you used to post. Not only were they informative but also gave us a glimpse of what your true passion is.
As your company has grown Ive watched you have to transition more from a Geeky EE who gets to engineer cool stuff to someone that has to deal with the headaches of trying to run a company.
As a ME myself and my wife a CE, we got into engineering because we LOVED engineering. But now that we are 10+ years into our careers, most employers want to push us toward project management or flat out management and we get to do less and less of the "core" engineering we love to do.
Do you find it difficult to balance the "I want to do EE engineering" with "I have a $10 mill company to run"?
Do you miss being an engineer first vs a business owner first? Will you hand most of the business reins over to some MBA type, giving you more time to go back to those engineering roots you love?
Do you need to be a MIT engineer (Score:2, Interesting)
My Hero (Score:4, Interesting)
You go girl!
That said, when I was a youngster, being a geek was nearly a death sentence. Especially in the rural jock culture where I lived. Now it seems geekdom is chic. Even though it is not as much a target of bullying as it was, it still seems that there is a lack of women in many geeky hobbies/fields.
My question is how do we change that and engage more females in our culture? What drew you to this, and can it be applied to draw in others?
Start-up Capitol (Score:5, Interesting)
Contributing Adafruit Software (Score:5, Interesting)
As a happy owner of the Adafruit Blue&White 16x2 LCD+Keypad Kit for Raspberry Pi I have used and modified the software that originally came with this kit.
There are some obvious uses for this kit. Two examples would be displaying its IP address and using the keypad to shutdown the Pi.
However, when I was modifying the software I could not find specific instructions on how to contribute software back to your site. I just checked again this morning (even the FAQ), and, if these instructions exist, I could not find them.
How does one contribute back?
The Future (Score:3, Interesting)
As the DIY electronics and robotics evolve, what do you see as the next logical progression?
First the hair (Score:4, Interesting)
With all your accomplishments, how does it makes you feel that the introduction to this Q&A begins with your hair?
Seriously, would we do this for a male engineer?
How do you compete? (Score:5, Interesting)
Companies like "sparkfun" and the hordes of china knockoff makers must really take a bite out of AdaFruit's sales figures. I see a lot of times when you come out with a new product sparkfun copies it within a month, and china knockoffs are flooded on ebay within weeks. How does that affect your bottom line when you put all the hard work into designing it and even writing an entire arduino library for your product and then other companies come along and sell a knock off of your product?
MIT And IRC (Score:2, Interesting)
A very long time ago, there was a very active community of MIT IRC users on EFNet, including yourself - do you see that kind of community happening again, and if so, under what guise? Jabber? Continued on IRC (admittedly I've not used it much in the past decade)? Or something else?
wearable electronics vision? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:My Hero (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you backing away from Open Source HW? (Score:3, Interesting)
It appears that way. For example:
http://www.adafruit.com/products/1535 [adafruit.com]
No schematics. No BOM. Details for FCC certification were kept confidential:
https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/ViewExhibitReport.cfm?mode=Sum&calledFromFrame=N&RequestTimeout=500&application_id=375407&fcc_id=S6OBLUEFRUIT [fcc.gov]
So, is Adafruit still Open Source or not?
Advice for open hardware company founders (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Are you backing away from Open Source HW? (Score:2, Interesting)
While I'm certainly not suggesting that this is a reason *not* to release the schematics and other details of the project and let people negotiate the legal landscape themselves, the FCC certification requirements for radio-oriented stuff seem to be a bit of a foil to the idea of open source hardware.
Even if you buy the Bluefruit or their similar CC3000 wi-fi board direct from Adafruit you can't really go beyond hobby work with it without requiring a new certification for your entire product.
This is, unfortunately, one of the issues with open source hardware: there's a lot more to hardware than the "source code".