Girl Enlightened Profile of ladyada! @adafruit #WHM16 #WomensHistoryMonth #WomenInSTEM
Girl Enlightened wrote up a nice piece on Adafruit’s founder and head engineer Limor Fried. Check it out here!
Another day, another way to celebrate Women’s History Month! Meet Limor Fried, brilliant, practical, generous engineer and business woman. Her company Adafruit sells kits for home assembly using simple engineering principles with “How to Videos”. Yes, she gladly explains the technology she uses and practices “open source” information sharing. There are no secrets, just great projects you can do at home where you can learn some basics engineering concepts. Limor’s company, Adafruit, is growing daily; American made with a constant stream of new products.
Have you ever struggled to program your new remote control and wondered how it really works? Is it a mysterious engineering miracle or the simple implementation of infrared light? Learn to speak “Robotics” and revel in her how-to directions, for this is not a frustrating mission of an IKEA couch assembly, this is a feast of creativity and engineering: an opportunity to grasp hold of new concepts and physically craft an original item for work or play!
One of the highlights of my high school experience was learning to solder in robotics club. Together with my partner, we assembled an Arduino wall avoiding robot that we named Larry. At the end of the semester, we stood like proud parents as it maneuvered a wall avoiding victory lap in the classroom. Yes, our soldering appeared somewhat provincial in comparison to the seasoned robotics group members, but the satisfaction of success dwarfed any assembly insecurities.
Plan an Adafruit party and make something cool! Shoot a video and upload it to Youtube and tag Limor with the link. You too can be a robotics goddess!
Adafruit has had paid day off for voting for our team for years, if you need help getting that going for your organization, let us know – we can share how and why we did this as well as the good results. Here are some resources for voting by mail, voting in person, and some NY resources for our NY based teams as well. If there are additional resources to add, please let us know – adafruit.com/vote
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.
