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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.
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?
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.
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?
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!