Interview with Limor Fried

Featured Engineer

Limor Fried

Limor Fried - Owner/Engineer - Adafruit Industries

How did you get into electronics/ engineering and when did you start?

When I was about 7 or 8 I saw a bunch of balloons stuck to the ceiling at a local mall, no one could reach them so I went home and constructed a mechanical arm out of some pliers, string and a broomstick. After going back and retrieving all the balloons it was then I realized engineering was for me.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

I love my Metcal 500 and all the great tips you can get, like the hot tweezers which are great for rework. I’m also tied to my Tek 2014B although the probes are a little wonky lately.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

I like to use a range of open source tools like avr-gcc and xemacs as well as Arduino, Processing, and Fritzing. For layout I learned on EagleCAD and I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

What is the hardest/trickiest bug you have ever fixed?

Debugging the SpokePOV – a persistence of vision display on a bike wheel – was really annoying because its hard to figure out why your interrupts are not going off while its spinning around at 10 mph. Eventually I figured it out but it was really frustrating and took a – long time –

What is on your bookshelf?

I have classics like Art of Electronics and Troubleshooting Analog circuits as well as the ARRL experimenter’s manual and Grebene’s Bipolar and MOS Analog Integrated Design.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve? (special way to analyze circuits, special process you use to make something, etc.)

Not really :) I studied more CS than EE in school and software can be much more unwieldy then hardware so I think that EE’s can learn a lot from the great writing and research done into complexity and debugging on that side. I try to use the white&black-box debugging technique’s I’ve learned to the extent they are applicable and it means that my projects go fairly smoothly.

What has been your favorite project?

I like the Tweet-a-Watt, a wireless power monitoring system that is fairly easy to build (no microcontrollers, just some light wiring and soldering). It’s a great example of using off the shelf hardware with ready-to-go wireless modules and then using some software to view, log and tweet the power usage data. It showed how reverse engineering + rapid prototyping (a weekend!) can beat big companies to market every time.

What are you currently working on at AdaFruit?

Lately we’ve been working on a lot of exciting “packs” for customers, the latest one we released was the “Digital programmable LED belt kit” – a project tutorial for how to make your own programmable, ultra-blinky LED belt. Perfect for parties, raves, parades, weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs. Wear it with pride, wear it with blinky! Anyone can follow our soldering tutorial to build your own heirloom LED belt , and hand it down to your grandkids…

What is the biggest challenge in running AdaFruit?

Controlled growth, how can we keep our values and standards high but still expand – There are tons of places to get electronics, we try to have the best support, tutorials and design. We want to be able to grow the company, release more open source hardware and still keep all of the things that make Adafruit more than just a company. We like to think we’re a cause, sharing, building & inspiring people to do more engineering.

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

Over the next few years we’ll continue to release our products and projects as open source hardware, but we will also add more products that are for more advanced customers. So in addition to having great beginner kits, we’ll have more complex and more challenging electronics for the makers who have moved on to the level of their hobby or profession.