This timeline from IEEE – The Institute features some truly excellent makers and tinkerers. We’re pumped that it includes an Adafruit shout-out!
Inventors are born tinkerers. Among the most famous was Benjamin Franklin, whose well-known kite experiment is memorialized in the diamond shape of IEEE’s logo. His inventions and discoveries from the 1700s include bifocals, a urinary catheter, and swim fins.
Samuel Morse, who dreamed of becoming a great painter, became obsessed with the idea of using electricity to transmit words over a length of wire. Morse, a professor of fine arts at New York University, in New York City, developed the electrical telegraph. Powered by batteries, Morse’s device used electromagnets to move a stylus to record dots and dashes on a moving strip of paper. In 1837 and 1838 Morse publicly demonstrated his electromagnetic recording telegraph to scientists and government officials. His system of dots and dashes became known as Morse code.
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, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, 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 with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
