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Interview: Ask Limor Fried About Open-Source Hardware and Adafruit
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.
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?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Do you intend to take the idea of wearable computing much beyond the eye-candy fashion accessories AdaFruit currently offers? It seems to me that there are opportunities for things like shoes which provide a built-in pedometer, for example.
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?
to sell baubles on the internet? How can you charge the prices you do?
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?
Silence is a state of mime.
How did you get the money to start-up for Adafruit? Did you use VC, if so how did you avoid becoming their indentured servant?
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?
As the DIY electronics and robotics evolve, what do you see as the next logical progression?
And does it bug you that a short paragraph introducing you leads with a cosmetic characteristic? Or, given that said characteristic is something unusual and deliberate, is that kind of what you're looking for?
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?
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?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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?
Adafruit has been doing a lot of interesting stuff around wearable electronics recently, having hired Becky Stern. Do you have a vision for where you want to go with that stuff, how much of your own time is spent on wearables now?
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
It appears that way. For example:
http://www.adafruit.com/products/1535
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
So, is Adafruit still Open Source or not?
As someone who sucessfully founded and now runs an open hardware company, do you have any advice for people that want to follow your path? Anything from business tips to community, production or even engineering pitfalls to avoid? How about finding partners?
Hi Limor,
A lot of open-source supported don't appreciate that there is a large component of closed source hardware components supporting their favorite platforms. maybe the BIOS on a PC, CPU microcode, firmware for ethernet or RAID adapters, the internal CPU architecture, the chipsets that support the CPUs. Even when you have the full HDL source for the system (e.g the OpenRISC CPU or the ATmega compatible AVR8 core) converting that to working silicon is all but impossible unless you have won a lottery - and to do so you need to use closed source tools.
How does Adafruit balance its Open Source ideals with the realities of providing up-to-date, high quality and low-cost products? How do you draw the line to deciede when a product is open enough for you and your company?
Warmest regards,
Mike
This isn't a question, but I wanted to note that Slashdot linked to her work back in January 2005 (the Minty MP3 player -- a DIY MP3 player in an altoids tin) -- before her company existed and had $10M a year in sales:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/05/01/15/1828200/build-your-own-mp3-player
That was a real eye-opener for me. I previously had no idea that a hobbyist could make something like that; I figured it was only the domain of giant companies with huge teams of engineers.
Anyhow, I've been playing with microcontrollers ever since. Thank you Limor!
Given that over the last several years, several great RISC CPUs that used to be available - DEC Alpha, MIPS IV, PA-RISC - have died, and also that most of their patents are close to expiring, are you considering the possibility of getting those CPUs out again as open source hardware? Where their HDL models would be out & available to anyone who wants to fab them, and that anybody who needs them can then fund their development and produce them for whatever use they prefer.
If I had to guess, there's probably not much sense in them carrying common parts that you could just as easily order from DigiKey, Mouser, or whoever (and probably at lower cost due to the volume they shift). There appears to be little (if any) overlap between what Adafruit sells and what the regular electronics distributors sell.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
When there are at least two good choices for open source electronic design automation tools (gEDA and KiCAD, maybe others), why is it that Adafruit uses closed-source and cripple-ware EDA tools for their open hardware? Linux has proven that open source tools, not just open applications, are important in maintaining healthy open ecosystem. Adafruit seems to be missing an opportunity to provide leadership in this area.