I have so much respect for her. I tried to start an open hardware business and even with a big successful kickstarter I couldn’t do it. I always wanted to make great products and fun easy to follow tutorials, but I failed. Seeing her company dominate was at first discouraging but has become cathartic. Even though I never made those helpful products and tutorials, someone has. It helps me feel like my failure wasn’t that bad. I’m so glad Lady Ada and her team have been doing so well.
I'd have to guess that a large part of Adafruit's success is that they are always. Hustling. They have a weekly Youtube video detailing the 20+ new gadgets they unveil every week.
I can remember a great lot of people who managed to fail even on "hello world" level hardware businesses. Don't take this as some kind of discouragement.
The prime majority of successful small electronics businesses do very simple things like utilitarian "bare PCB" gadgets.
Olimex for example manages to get quite a lot of business despite being quite far away from Silicon valley's commotion (located in Plovdiv, a 350k people town)
I knew a teen who managed to spin a simple WiFi tester on ESP32 commercially. Also, just a PCB with a lipo battery and an MCU. He's doing great despite amateur level EE and it being a very niche product (professional WiFi installers are much the only buyers)
My own opinion, in electronics business you are always in between the Scylla and Charybdis of big and unprofitable businesses (commodity OEMs,) and niche/meme/fad products (hoverboards, vapers, and of course... the juicer)
It's a brutal space to operate in and seems to be getting worse all the time. Investment capital is scare. Product copies are rampant and hitting the market faster and faster to the point I even sometimes see copies reach store shelves before the original. Suppliers are increasingly consolidated and manufacturers can be hostile to little guys who need delivery schedules.
Anyone who finds success in such a market has my respect and the fact the Limor has managed to not only succeed, but thrive in such an environment is a testament to how incredible she is.
I was part of a team who build (one batch only of) a hardware IoT product that I'm _still_ really proud of. Our bill of materials was ~$70, maybe 50% or so of that on our cpu/microcontroller board (the kinda standard "RaspberryPi plus an Arduino" kind of design). By the time we failed to raise funding for a second production run and threw in thew towel (amongst internal infighting), we could have functionally replaced that with the at-the-time brand new ESP8266 (this was 2013/14) for a few dollars. But we already had (expensive) plastic injection moulds made up that fit our boards so we couldn't even switch our insides easily.
Hardware is hard. Major respect to anyone who get it right at small scales.
Yeah I’m definitely not really kicking myself anymore, but it was a brutal downhill slide to failure when it was happening.
And even though I tried to do a simple PCB product, I offered a lot of different accessories and kit options, and the product itself had an onboard radio that needed certification. I just didn’t appreciate how much complexity these little things add. I did know full well that I was unaware, and planned to figure it out by doing. It was painful though.
Limor is an amazing woman who has been very good to me. I honestly think she does not get enough credit for- A. having viable hardware manufacturing in the US and B. investing in good IP protection in China so that her products have never been cloned here. She has an absolutely uncrossable moat around her product line (at least as far as China is concerned) because of the massive knowledge base built by both creative, and technical professionals that it's tied to.
Thanks! Well I sure won’t try doing a kickstarter business essentially solo again.
Recently I’ve found a job with someone who values open source, so while some details have yet to bear out, it seems like we might be open sourcing our work. So I may be able to get regular income working on open source. So far it’s all really great. I don’t want to do a solo business again, but I’m always trying to make sure my time is spent doing ethically sound work. Open source is a big part of my philosophy there.
I absolutely love Adafruit tech for low-volume hardware hacking projects. Particularly the Feather nRF52832 [0]: onboard flash, Bluetooth Low Energy, a 5V-to-3.3V converter, and USB battery charging all in one little off-the-shelf board. And the runtime [1] and bootloader [2] are totally open! I'm tinkering with my own little fork to add signed updates, lock down the OTA DFU mechanism, and switch to a more secure BLE pairing mode.
By the way, if anyone knows of an alternative to the RedBear Nano V2 [3] in terms of form factor and power profile, please let me know, since Particle is sadly killing that board off after buying out RedBear. Glad I don't have to worry about that with Adafruit.
When I was in high school, I somehow came across her post on building an MP3 player and putting it into an Altoids tin[0]. The post was a formative experience in my life and spurred me to pursue an engineering degree!
Automated transcription can get you 80-90% of the way now, meaning hand transcription (if needed) only requires a light touch. Transcription has gone from very expensive to now submitting your video to an API and getting back your transcript in a few hours for a few dollars ($0.10 - $1 a minute). Even at a very high rate, that's only $26 for the linked video.
I don't know, automatic subtitles on youtube suck for anything that is not average tone, voice, speed or vocabulary. Not to mention if you don't speak english.
Paying $26 for something similar doesn't feel good value.
We've tried something like this during a french python conf to get subtitles for deaf people. It was impossible to even understand the result.
Have you checked lately? Automated subtitles on YouTube are getting ridiculously good. They're currently almost as good as I am at recognizing speech, including accented speech and in many cases specialized technical terms.
Recently (as recent as a couple of months) they've still been terrible enough to be great entertainment to me. (I don't need them to understand videos, but I love to turn them on and laugh at the nonsense they generate.)
Are you sure you're thinking of the automated subtitles? Some youtube videos have manually written captions too.
In my experience, they're only good when I don't need them. If the audio is clear, it's astonishingly accurate (except for the lack of punctuation). But for heavily accented speech, or if there's any background noise, or there are multiple speakers, it completely fails, and it's better to go find a pair of headphones and turn up the volume.
Also, I hate how the auto-generated CC spits out one word at a time while scrolling the lines up, and how it keeps the previous caption on screen mixed in with the next one during long moments of non-speech (if the speaker isn't in frame, it's hard to know what the context is). That's not how I read—it's not how anyone reads. I would rather it showed a single block at a time, with the current word highlighted.
And what's with the random "yeah yeah yeah", "[applause]", or "[music]" captions when it's just guessing? Better to put question marks than be completely wrong.
lack of punctuation and capitalisation also makes informal speech quite difficult to understand sentences just run into another makes it hard to know what's referring to what gets split into unnatural sentences... you get the point.
However, automated CC is good when you're trying to find a particular part of a long video, and you don't want to watch the whole thing just to find it. It's easy to skim the captions to find a relevant part.
There are a few attempts, I have no idea how good they are. And they're manual transcription only.
There are several open source speech recognition systems (like Deepspeech and CMUSphinx) but there don't seem to be any user-friendly frontends for them.
More than 10 years ago now, I built myself a few x0xb0xes, one of Limor's first projects. You could only buy the PCBs and had to source all of the other stuff yourself. I still have one somewhere, those were fun to build and had a great community. http://blog.bityard.net/category/electronics.html
Very satisfying to see how big Adafruit has become.
This is another unfortunate consequence of the disastrous American typographical perversion of Putting Capitals on Almost Every Word in a Title (Often in an inconsistent Way To Add Insult To Injury).
That is what I thought as well. And the video kept on about her accomplishments as an engineer and I kept on wondering when they will hit the controversy. Very embarrassing.
I just want to recognize that what you’ve said is the truth. I see you getting flak for it but honestly I’d expect plenty of my backers to be pissed. I failed to deliver on a lot of repeated promises. I did learn a lot, that’s for sure. Thank you for your pledge. I’m sorry I didn’t make it happen.
Man, this seems unnecessarily harsh, and distracting from the positive props to Limor. He’s well aware of what happened, does it need to be rehashed here? Starting something is extremely difficult and most people fail. HN celebrates people who try.
Everything said there is correct. I did a terrible job and really I don’t think it’s wrong to say so. Few who backed that campaign would be likely to ever buy from me again. It’s okay to name that, it’s the truth.
I believe you're right that HN celebrates people who try. The OPs comment didn't reflect the reality of the situation. And a huge part of HN is failure. Failure has many facets, for example we more often than expected lose great products marred by people and their bad choices. Limor is the antithesis to that. I've learned a ton from her work, and have built many random things using her contributions or designs. People should always keep in mind failing doesn't always just end there and is over. If you have success it's often a culmination of honesty, integrity, thoughtful design and timeliness. Delight your customer. I think Limor embodies that and, while harsh, my comment is not false. Something being run poorly should be just as much of a learning aspect as the opposite and a reflection point given the juxtaposition of the two. Limor has provided positively, to likely, millions of people in her career. Yes, be like Limor - and always have top of mind your users, your customers, your friends and family and how she's treated them. Because beyond the product many lose, or never had, the rest of the picture in sight.
> The OPs comment didn’t reflect the reality of the situation.
He said he failed, then you said he failed, it seems like you agree, but feels like kicking someone who’s down. The comment was about Limor, not his life story... maybe it doesn’t need to capture every nuance? Did his point require more detail?
> while harsh, my comment is not false.
Does that make it necessary to litigate here and now?
> People should always keep in mind failing doesn’t always just end there and is over.
Indeed, failure leads to lessons learned. People who’ve failed and then try again tend to fare better than first timers. Maybe your idea is something worth mulling over before declaring in public you wouldn’t give him a second chance or back anything associated with him ever again?
I’ve tried and failed before, and it was intensely stressful trying to keep people happy while making stupid mistakes and having things go downhill. I suspect having people with an axe to grind spread super negative feelings about me and my future work wouldn’t be any fun, or helpful, or educational. It’d be one thing if it was a scam, but poor execution, maybe let that go?
> It’d be one thing if it was a scam, but poor execution, maybe let that go?
Poor execution is a form of scam to your customer. A promise unfulfilled, a delivery timeline slipped, an untruthful representation of the product and a fake review. They're all forms of what not to do.
Maybe it's not that you see this as me grinding an axe, but rehashing your failure and you have a far different perspective and sensitivity to addressing it. From PEP 20: "Errors should never pass silently." Maybe let's not bury the failures and show that those who are successful approach it in that manner.
I can understand it feeling like a scam. It’s hard to tell from the outside. See this talk I gave in 2018 for my perspective just about 5 years after the campaign started.
