limores

It's a little late for Christmas presents, but if you throw a little time-machine action into the mix, this might be the perfect gift for the hacker kid in your life: Circuit Playground plushies.

The plushies are the newest product from Adafruit Industries, a leader in the open-source hardware world and the maker of a wide range of products for hackers young and old. Led by Entrepreneur magazine's entrepreneur of the year Limor Fried, Adafruit has a long history of promoting the do-it-yourself movement, and giving those who play and work in it the tools they need. … Read more

For Limor Fried, a hardware hacker and leader in the booming maker and do-it-yourself movements, there was never a question of waiting for someone else to jump in and do a better job of inspiring girls than Lego has done with its widely-panned Lego Friends set.

The product was featured on the cover of Bloomberg Business Week last year and drew worldwide attention as the global toy company's first major attempt at showcasing girls in a new set. Still, many Lego fans were upset that the company had focused on well-worn stereotypes and had ignored the modern reality that girls can do pretty much anything they want, whether or not there's pink or purple involved.

For Fried, who runs open-source hardware developer Adafruit Industries, it sounded like it was time for a little culture hacking.

… Read more

Imagine: You're walking down the street at night. You turn a corner, and suddenly, coming your way, you see someone with "Avatar" playing on their jacket.

It's a futuristic notion, but according to the folks at open-source hardware maker Adafruit Industries, it's one that's just months away.

That's because Adafruit has just unveiled Flora, its brand-new Arduino and Arduino-compatible wearable electronics platform. Designed to give anyone the ability to craft a matrix of up to hundreds or someday, more than 1,000 small LED "pixels," Flora is meant to make it possible to easily craft custom wearable multi-LED pixel designs perfect for art events like Burning Man, or even the streets of whatever town you live in. … Read more

When Microsoft's hot new Kinect motion-sensitive controller was released earlier this month, Phil Torrone and Limor Fried saw an opportunity to subvert what was being presented as a closed system.

Torrone and Fried, the principals behind the open-source hardware firm Adafruit Industries, love almost any kind of culture hacking, and in the Kinect, they recognized a system that presented users far more utility than Microsoft was offering.

Not wasting the chance to raise a bit of a stir, Adafruit said it would pony up $1,000 to the first person who could come up with an open-source driver for … Read more

AUSTIN, TEXAS--I'm sitting in the lobby of the Radisson hotel downtown with a bunch of the folks putting on Maker Faire.

One of them is Make magazine editor Phil Torrone, who, among other crazy ventures, was the co-genius behind Roomba Frogger, when he and fellow hacker Limor Fried modified a Roomba vacuum cleaner and wirelessly directed it to run back and forth across an Austin street like the iconic classic video game during South by Southwest 2006.

This morning, however, Torrone is tired, as it's only 8 a.m. But he's got a goal, and it's … Read more