Molly’s first Adafruit blog post

Well howdy.  I’m Molly (Rae), newly minted COO for Adafruit.  I’m just starting to get my hands dirty with DIY electronics and am super excited to be working with the smartest, most enthusiastic do-ers I’ve ever met.

I’m coming at Adafruit from a building angle, so I’m here learning the basics along with a lot of you.  I’m a building systems nerd, and HVAC systems are a little harder to generate from my teeny-tiny Brooklyn apartment.   Besides buildings, I’m a night photography enthusiast.  Here’s a 30-second exposure shot I took from when lower Manhattan was shot into the dark ages.  It looks deceptively light…actually the only sources are from passing cars on the Bowery and candlelight from the restaurant to the left.  The hurricane and blackout makes me especially excited (and grateful) to work at Adafruit where we have cell phone charge and internet come hell or high water (of course, if the entire grid collapses there will be trouble even for us…)

Bleecker Street and the Bowery

I also love open ocean swimming, so if any of you can come with a sonographic, waterproof compass that alerts me when I’m swimming off course, I would greatly appreciate it!  Here’s me after hiking up an active volcano in the temperate rainforests of South America (near Pucon, Chile, to be specific):

I will be managing a lot of operations and behind-the-scenes stuff at Adafruit but expect to see me popping in and out of the blog from time to time!


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6 Comments

  1. Welcome, Molly. 🙂

  2. Well, howdy! 😀

    Um – I don’t think it needs to be sonar based to work… just waterproof. A GPS and a magnetometer should work as long as you are close to the surface (I’m assuming you aren’t talking about diving – just swimming) – I’d probably mount the GPS module on the small of your back on the outside of your swimsuit, so that it’s facing up most of the time. This could then be combined with a HUD in the form of some LEDs mounted around your goggles (I’d probably go with some tiny surface mount LEDs, and wire it up with kapton coated small-guage wire) and/or audio feedback thru some waterproof earbuds (and you could add a MP3 player module also if you wanted). And to top it off; you could add a long-range wireless module or cell phone module to tweet your progress!

    Hmm – most or all of the stuff you’d need Adafruit has… I might start with a Coobro kit, and do a custom firmware for it; I’m not sure off the top of my head if it has a built in compass or if that would need to be a separate module. Waterproofing it with some silicone sealant and/or sugru shouldn’t be difficult.

  3. Looking forward to hearing more about what you’re up-to Molly! Please think broadly about what you share. There’s knowledge in everything and information wants to be free. Sharing is caring and all that jazz 🙂

    Thank you for making Adafruit even more awesome.

  4. Hi!

    Couldn’t resist commenting as I’m currently sitting at work programming a controller to hack around some stupid internal logic on Trane Intellipack RTUs that are misbehaving. Why won’t they just let me gut all internals and control everything?

    My introduction to controllers has been through building automation systems, largely American Auto-Matrix. Recently I’ve begun tinkering with Arduino and have been interested to see how much functionality of a general purpose HVAC controller I can replicate or perhaps even use them in conjunction to do some clever hacks.

    This site has been very helpful in helping me learn and moving my DIY projects along. I look forward to seeing what you do here, and always nice to see a fellow Controls person out in the world.

  5. Welcome Molly, glad you’re on board. 🙂

  6. Welcome! Most COOs are not the public or blogging type. Good to see you setting new trends already!

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