Limor Fried is an engineer best known for her work at Adafruit Industries, the company she founded in 2005. Adafruit’s goals are simple: create the best place online for learning electronics and make the best designed products for makers of all ages and skill levels. The company sells all kinds of DIY kits, from phone chargers and learning toys topower monitoring systems and art robots. Limor has emerged as a leader of the open-source hardware movement and is a goddess (LadyAda, as they call her) among makers. She was the first to encourage hacking Microsoft’s Kinect (even offering a $3,000 prize), and she’s fiercely passionate about getting kids to explore science and engineering. Limor talked to us about Adafruit’s workshop in New York City, her current projects, and her best productivity tricks. Want to know more?
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
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Q: “What’s your workspace setup like?”
A: “My desk is covered (some would say littered) with in-progress designs. It takes awhile to get a design right, so I have board revisions, testing jigs, and equipment all over the place. It looks messy, but I could probably find most things blindfolded. I’ve had this desk for over 10 years, same with the chair that is slightly falling apart, but it’s “home.” I’m currently working on a few open-source designs for the Rasperry Pi Linux computer.”
I’m so happy to see your desk! My. Life. Story. I have tried to ‘keep a neat desk’ in the past, but I have always gone back to several projects that I’m working on all over the place. Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison has ‘busy’ desks also. I was glad to share this with my wife as well. 🙂 http://thecustomgeek.com/images/desk.jpg
Bonus question – how many Adafruit products can you count? (I counted 23)
Is that a Model M I see?
yup!
Q: “What’s your workspace setup like?”
A: “My desk is covered (some would say littered) with in-progress designs. It takes awhile to get a design right, so I have board revisions, testing jigs, and equipment all over the place. It looks messy, but I could probably find most things blindfolded. I’ve had this desk for over 10 years, same with the chair that is slightly falling apart, but it’s “home.” I’m currently working on a few open-source designs for the Rasperry Pi Linux computer.”
I’m so happy to see your desk! My. Life. Story. I have tried to ‘keep a neat desk’ in the past, but I have always gone back to several projects that I’m working on all over the place. Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison has ‘busy’ desks also. I was glad to share this with my wife as well. 🙂
http://thecustomgeek.com/images/desk.jpg
Bonus question – how many Adafruit products can you count? (I counted 23)
mostly shuttle computers from newegg for all the shipping and inventory stations and macs for design/video