Designer developer Arduino named entrepreneur of the year in the US

According to experts of the magazine Entrepreneur Magazine, Limor Fried was able to recognize some kind of need, the desire of people to do something with their own hands. This incomparable pleasure is known to every person who has twisted a bed or locker at least once, following the precise assembly instructions that come with a set of parts. The pleasure of creating a new thing yourself, something that did not exist before.

American engineer Limor Fried, known on the Internet under the nickname LadyAda , founder of Adafruit Industries and an activist of the movement Open Source Hardware, was awarded the title "Entrepreneur of the Year" by the American magazine Entrepreneur Magazine. Maybe this award is not very honorable and can not be compared with the Nobel Prize, but the fact that open hardware and the Open Source movement is not simply associated with entrepreneurship is important - it is generally the most successful business that exists in our time!

Limor Fried and her company Adafruit Industries are well known as designers of designers based on the Open Source platform Arduino - a hardware computing platform, the main components of which are a simple I / O board and the development environment in the language Processing / Wiring.
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Over the past year, Adafruit Industries has sold Arduino designers for a total of $ 4.5 million. For example, the MintyBoost Kit alone ($ 19.75) sold around 50,000 - a simple DC / DC converter for recharging electronics from two batteries via USB.

MintyBoost Kit - the first and only in the world of Open Source kit for charging gadgets. Lady Ada herself designed this box in which you can shove two batteries - and recharge any gadget via USB with parameters 500mA @ 5V. These options are suitable for the iPhone, so you can safely go on a long hike or journey, throwing a couple of dozen batteries into the backpack.





In the Adafruit Industries catalog there are dozens of different designers on the Arduino and not only on it. The buyers of these gadgets are not simple “users”, but beginner radio amateurs who are interested in assembling the device from ready-made parts.

In the seven years since its founding in 2005, Adafruit Industries has mailed more than half a million designers to customers. Details for them are made right next to the office on industrial equipment.

Limor Fried started the business not on her own. When she finished her last year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005, she often published functional diagrams of various devices such as an MP3 player, synthesizer, or lighting engineer during her graduation work in electrical engineering. Soon it was literally flooded with letters "fans" with requests to sell a set for the assembly. The student refused for a long time, but in the end she finally gave up and decided on a desperate step. She took 10 thousand dollars, which her parents allocated for her training, and purchased a bulk batch of parts, from which she began to assemble sets and send them to customers. On each set, she earned about $ 10 by sending parcels from the post office next to the student dormitory.

Weekly, Limor posted online the design of a new device: gyrosensors, solar panels, thermal printers, etc. In the end, the business went so well that the girl had to hire a few assistants and register the company she called Adafruit Industries. Now the company has a staff of 35 people.