So I’ve been wanting to share this story about how I got connected (or maybe addicted haha) to Adafruit. I was helping my 14 year old daughter Vicky with her school science project a few months ago (monitor plant/soil moisture and automatically water as needed using only solar power) and bought an Arduino Uno starter kit from Amazon. All seemed to be going well and we were working thru learning enough about Arduino to get the project going. The most painful part was getting an LCD going to display live information. Sadly the LCD was also purchased on Amazon and there was no support or instructions to get it working. No problem, I’m a network engineer and I’m used to figuring things out…..so as I put my google-fu to work I keep finding Adafruit…in many libraries….tutorials….everywhere. So I start looking around on the site and buy a few items….see the cool looking lady with the pink hair here and there. I tend to be fairly tunnel visioned when working out technical issues so didn’t realize for at least 2 months that this was a female owned company! How cool is that? The initial motivation for learning this stuff was to encourage my daughter to learn engineering skills and here I am buying products to teach her from a female engineer owned company without even realizing it. BTW – science project got a full 100% grade. Can’t wait to get Vicky going on the soon to start AdaBox!
THANK YOU for being you Adafruit! I love the “learning site with a gift shop” way of doing things. The tutorials have definitely made learning a wide range of technologies incredibly easy and provide just the right amount of foundation to go make whatever we want with the products.
BIG THANKS to Tony D as well! Loved the “wifi things” series and now micropython!
-Matt
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.
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Python for Microcontrollers — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: 100 CircuitPython Community Libraries, a New Arduino UNO and much more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
