Adafruit Industries
Adafruit Industries is an open-source hardware company based in New York, United States. It was founded by Limor Fried in 2005. The company designs, manufactures and sells electronics products, electronics components, tools, and accessories. It also produces learning resources, including live and recorded videos about electronics, technology, and programming.
History
Limor Fried, then a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began selling electronic kits on her website from her own designs in 2005. She later moved to New York City and established Adafruit Industries.In 2010, Adafruit offered a reward for whoever could hack Microsoft's Kinect to make its motion-sensing capabilities available for use for other projects. This reward was increased to $2,000 and then $3,000 after Microsoft said it would work to prevent such "tampering". In November, the reward was issued to Hector Martin for his open-source Kinect driver.
The company had $22 million in revenue in 2013 and $33 million in 2014.
Company name
The name Adafruit comes from Fried's online moniker "Ladyada", a homage to computer science pioneer Ada Lovelace. The company aims to get more people involved in technology, science and engineering.Products
In addition to distributing third-party components and boards such as the Raspberry Pi, Adafruit develops and sells its own development boards for educational and hobbyist purposes. In 2016, the company released the Circuit Playground, a board with an Atmel ATmega32u4 microcontroller and a variety of sensors, followed in 2017 by the more powerful Atmel SAMD21 based Circuit Playground Express. They, like many Adafruit products, are circular in shape for ease of use in education and wearable electronics projects, along with the FLORA and Gemma, the company's wearable electronics development platforms. In 2017, Adafruit Industries' best-selling product was the Circuit Playground ExpressWearable Development Boards
Adafruit offers various electronic components designed to be used in wearable technology. In 2012, they introduced the FLORA, which was their first development board specifically designed for wearable electronics and inspired by the Arduino LilyPad. It featured a small circular shape, USB support, and various included sensors to simplify integration with E-textiles, and pins that allow the use of conductive thread. They are "Arduino-compatible", and designed to be programmable using custom board libraries for the Arduino IDE. One year later, Adafruit announced the Gemma board, which had many similar features with a smaller size.NeoPixel
NeoPixel is Adafruit's brand of individually addressable red-green-blue LED. They are based on the WS2812 LED and WS2811 driver, where the WS2811 is integrated into the LED, for reduced footprint. Adafruit manufactures several products with NeoPixels with form factors such as strips, rings, matrices, Arduino shields, traditional five-millimeter cylinder LED and individual NeoPixel with or without a PCB. The control protocol for NeoPixels is based on only one communication wire. Adafruit provides an Arduino library and a Python Library to help with the programming of NeoPixels. In addition to the traditional RGB technology, Adafruit manufactures a red-green-blue-white variant of NeoPixel for all products except those that feature a NeoPixel Mini 3535. Those integrate an additional white LED in the package for extra possible color mixes and selectable white color temperature.CircuitPython
In January, 2017, Adafruit introduced CircuitPython, a fork of the MicroPython programming language optimized to run on Adafruit and third-party products. CircuitPython runs on Adafruit boards with a flash memory chip and a supported microcontroller or single-board computer.In 2019, resources for CircuitPython were moved to circuitpython.org, reflecting the appearance of non-Adafruit boards that use CircuitPython. This includes CircuitPython for microcontrollers and CircuitPython on single-board computers using a compatibility layer Adafruit named "Blinka", to access general-purpose input/output functionality and compatibility.
Adafruit has fostered a community which has contributed software libraries for more than 488 sensors and drivers.
Feather development boards
Feather is Adafruit's largest brand of "Arduino-like" boards and accessories. The boards share a form factor, pinouts, and lithium polymer battery charging. Certain boards add special features such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or cellular network connectivity, built-in prototyping space, or SD card communication. More features can be added with "FeatherWing" expansion cards that with an LCD or NeoPixel array, DC motor drivers, and other capabilities.A fairly complete list of Feather form factor boards, FeatherWings and accessories has been compiled into a GitHub Awesome List.