Is Becky Stern an artist or engineer or designer? At Adafruit Industries, it’s all of the above. As Director of Wearable Electronics, Becky combines her DIY skills with crafting talents to build cool gizmos that utilize all sorts of electronic components.
You might recognize Becky from her work at MAKE, her Youtube videos, or her Adafruit tutorials where she shown how to make everything from RFID rings to pixel hearts. How does Becky pull it all off? We caught up with her to learn about Becky’s favorite gear and work habits.
Location: Work in west SoHo, NYC, live in Brooklyn Current Gig: Director of Wearable Electronics, Adafruit One word that best describes how you work: Speedboat Current mobile device: Nexus 4 running CyanogenMod Current computer: 27″ iMac
What apps/software/tools can’t you live without? Why?
Arduino IDE—I use this software every day to prototype new wearable electronics projects run by the Adafruit FLORA or GEMMA. It’s a code editor that communicates with the microcontroller boards, and we’ve made our own mods to it for working with our more eccentric hardware.
Final Cut Pro X—I’m a recent convert from Final Cut Pro 7. I use Final Cut to edit my weekly wearables tutorial videos!P
Manfrotto Magic Arm—I use this to cantilever my camera over my desk for straight-down shots in build videos.
Hakko soldering iron—I use it every day to put together electronics like my LED birthday tiara, and one of my teammates put googly eyes on it.
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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.
