Hasta La Gadget!

Adafruit, the DIY electronics website and marketplace, is espousing the popular strategy of “get em’ young” with a new live action short video series broadcast on YouTube. The series, called Circuit Playground, takes an alphabetical approach to teaching kids about the basics of circuits, components and concepts that will come in handy if the tots watching have aspirations of becoming electrical engineers, or just of building their own hobby projects at home.

The inaugural episode covers amperes, the unit of measurement for electric current flowing through a circuit. The co-hosts are Adabot, an adorable robot puppet helping keep the kids entertained, and Adafruit founder Limor Fried, providing easy-to-follow, but not patronizing explanations of the concepts involved. The intro features a number of animated characters representing circuit components, and there’s even a special guest appearance from André-Marie Ampère, after whom the ampere is named, so there’s an element of science history in the mix, too.

At less than 5 minutes, you also won’t have to keep your kids focused too long to take in the message. And if you’re a big kid who might not be all that well versed in the basics of circuits and electronics, you’ll probably learn something, too.

Have you seen those t-shirts that have a built-in equalizer? They look cool in theory, but they’re not really awesome up close. Most of them have this awkward-looking large cardboard in the middle where the LEDs shine through. Then there’s the fact that you have to carry around a battery pouch. This necktie variant is a lot cooler.

Becky Stern of Adafruit calls her creation the LED Ampli-tie. This particular tie runs on Adafruit’s FLORA, an Arduino-compatible board. The Flora detects ambient noise via a small microphone hidden behind the tie’s knot. Adafruit already wrote the program that will make the 16 Flora RGB LEDs react to the noise. The best part? The Ampli-tie runs on the FLORA’s battery.

Check out Becky’s post on Adafruit’s website for the full walkthrough.

[via MAKE]

Every week, a new and interesting human being tackles our decidedly geeky take on the Proustian Q&A. This is the Engadget Questionnaire.

In the inaugural appearance of our questionnaire on Engadget, Adafruit founder Limor Fried opens up about her love for her Metcal MX-500 soldering station and the joys of open-source build projects. Follow us after the break for more from Limor.

Filed under: Misc

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Adafruit‘s Flora wearable platform is barely a year old, yet it already has a little sibling on the way — and we do mean little. The newer Gemma is Arduino-programmable over USB like its relative, but measures just over half the size of the Flora at an inch in diameter. It’s even bordering on cute, as far as circuit boards go. Before developing any grand visions of wearable computers, though, be aware that Gemma’s features scale down with its size: there’s only three input/output pins, and a limited amount of memory won’t let it handle more than about a dozen of Adafruit’s NeoPixel lights. All the same, any aspiring tailor willing to trade flexibility for subtlety in a costume will likely want to sign up for notification of the Gemma’s in-stock date at the source link.

Filed under: Wearables

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Source: Adafruit

While I don’t often hold stock in random pronouncements by magazines, I’m shocked and thrilled that Entrepreneur Magazine named Limor Fried, founder of Adafruit Industries, as their 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year. Limor runs a $4.5 million company with 25 employees and she produces some of the coolest electronic gadgets around.

It’s amazing that Adafruit Industries exists at all – after all, the average code jockey doesn’t want to handle solder or jumpers. However, the company has made it easy for electronics hobbyists to learn almost everything there is to know about some amazing microcontrollers, Arduino boards, and even skill badges for geeky Boy Scouts. They’ve taken off, selling $10 million in gear this year.

Limor started her company in her MIT dorm room by selling electronics kits to her friends, making about $10 on each kit. Soon she moved to New York and in October moved from a 2,000 square foot office to a sprawling 12,000 square foot loft in Soho.

You can read the article here but you’re actually better off heading over to the Adafruit website and picking up a few kits. Nothing beats the feeling of firing up a homebrew electronics project and I’m thrilled to see the maker community band together to elevate one of their own amazing hackers.