Hardware is hot — and poised to get hotter. Venture capital investment in connected device hardware startups reached approximately $1.48 billion in 2014, more than triple the amount of two years earlier.
Meanwhile, the “fairy tale” acquisitions of Dropcam, Nest, Beats and Oculus — and the IPOs of Fitbit and GoPro — fuel public interest and momentum for new startups in hardware.
Hardware is the new software.
The past decade made it increasingly easy for anyone with a bright idea to launch an app, thanks to the emergence of support factors as varied as crowdfunding, cloud infrastructure and open-source communities like GitHub.
Today, an entrepreneur can just as easily bring a viable hardware product to market. Credit is due to many of the same factors — but also to a new breed of facilities that allow people to turn their bright ideas into physical products more quickly than ever before.
Read more – we’d also like to see a map or component companies (like Adafruit) that are commonly used for these start ups and 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
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 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: MicroPython v1.24.0 is here, a Halloween Wrap-up and Much More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
What are hardware accelerators doing to support cool ideas that really require top-of-the-line compute horsepower at the edge of the network to design and implement? These are applications that cannot rely on the infinite compute resources that’re available in the cloud for a variety of reasons—you need them down at ground zero. Legacy compute hardware for building mundane activity trackers or fancy thermostats and the like would work on contemporary microcontrollers that can push the data to your smartphone or online for processing and deriving actionable insights.
Take for example retail analytics, interactive smart displays and digital signage, computer-vision/machine learning intensive applications, high-end video and image processing, portable/connected medical devices, etc….you get the drift—my grandma’s microcontroller or the wildly popular Raspberry Pi’s and copycats ain’t gonna cut it. They just don’t have the teeth to bite into such CPU intensive applications. Have you considered the powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon processor-based compute platforms for hardware designs? You get high-performance processing at mobile power efficiencies. Can’t beat that. Inforce Computing, a licensee of the Snapdragon processors eliminates the mumbo-jumbo of designing the compute hardware out of the equation by providing modular systems on top of which you can throw your secret sauce and build your entire hardware. Check them out.
What are hardware accelerators doing to support cool ideas that really require top-of-the-line compute horsepower at the edge of the network to design and implement? These are applications that cannot rely on the infinite compute resources that’re available in the cloud for a variety of reasons—you need them down at ground zero. Legacy compute hardware for building mundane activity trackers or fancy thermostats and the like would work on contemporary microcontrollers that can push the data to your smartphone or online for processing and deriving actionable insights.
Take for example retail analytics, interactive smart displays and digital signage, computer-vision/machine learning intensive applications, high-end video and image processing, portable/connected medical devices, etc….you get the drift—my grandma’s microcontroller or the wildly popular Raspberry Pi’s and copycats ain’t gonna cut it. They just don’t have the teeth to bite into such CPU intensive applications. Have you considered the powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon processor-based compute platforms for hardware designs? You get high-performance processing at mobile power efficiencies. Can’t beat that. Inforce Computing, a licensee of the Snapdragon processors eliminates the mumbo-jumbo of designing the compute hardware out of the equation by providing modular systems on top of which you can throw your secret sauce and build your entire hardware. Check them out.