“The best way to get started is to put up a simple website and see how it goes,” says Limor Fried, who founded Adafruit Industries, which specializes in do-it-yourself electronics building kits. Personal blogs require no financial outlay, are easy to update with photos and descriptions of your work and can even net a few informal sales though PayPal. “Adding PayPal buttons for payment is very easy,” Fried says. “That’s how I started out.”
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Nice article – thanks for sharing! It does bring me back to something I’ve always wondered about. I’ve been an Adafruit customer for a few years, and always wondered why you had two different websites, Adafruit and LadyAda.net. Did it just sort of evolve this way? You started the personal blog site, and then realized you needed a commerce site that the blog wasn’t really able to handle? I am thinking of starting an online business, and I’m wondering: If you had it all to do over again, would you have kept the two separate sites, or do you think now, in retrospect, that it would be better to have just one site? Thanks!
Woot!! Go Lady Ada with the PM mention!
Nice article – thanks for sharing! It does bring me back to something I’ve always wondered about. I’ve been an Adafruit customer for a few years, and always wondered why you had two different websites, Adafruit and LadyAda.net. Did it just sort of evolve this way? You started the personal blog site, and then realized you needed a commerce site that the blog wasn’t really able to handle? I am thinking of starting an online business, and I’m wondering: If you had it all to do over again, would you have kept the two separate sites, or do you think now, in retrospect, that it would be better to have just one site? Thanks!
@chip
1) we’ll always have two sites, documentation as well as the store.
2) we would do the same thing again.
Great – thanks for the info!
Chip