Adafruit Blog

Last week Adafruit received a demand letter from Flux.ai, discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368121 Yesterday Adafruit updated their blog with a link to the complaint: https://blog.adafruit.com/

The printer spyware has an interesting backstory. A Spanish venture-backed firm is developing some vaporware called Print&Go and has convinced the NY DA's office that it'll permanently solve the Luigi problem. The best part? This company is drooling at the possibility of getting a permanent rent-seeking license for printers they didn't design, for nonexistent vaporware software that reduces its capabilities. They frame it as "enhancing 3D printer capabilities," the way a slaveowner would frame putting chains on a slave's wrists as an "employee retention innovation." Is everyone involved with promoting this software and these laws lying? Of course. https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/08/any-user-who-has-a-3d-printer-wou…

BTW David Ahl has placed all of his work, including this book, into the public domain https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/06/16/david-ahl-places-all-his-classic-… and so we can link to the Hexapawn page in the original book https://dn790005.ca.archive.org/0/items/Basic_Computer_Games_Microcomp… Unfortunately I do not know of an online source for the Korean edition that so inspired the original poster.

Adafruit got a $36,000 tariff bill for a single shipment of supplies they'd imported. https://blog.adafruit.com/2025/05/08/high-tariffs-become-real-with-our… While those tariffs eventually went down, I think that's the answer to the question of where the tariff money is coming from. U.S. importers are paying it as their goods come in. In some cases they'll then raise prices to cover it, meaning tariff costs get passed on to consumers. $96.5 billion worth. I just think the impact of tariffs hasn't trickled through the system and reached consumer yet. But if the goal is really funding the government (like the article suggests), then it's basically meant to function like a new kind of tax.

>>Is this meant sarcastically? No I don't mean it sarcastically, why do you ask? Do you not see Lady Ada as a shining light of the industry? Lady Ada is one of the industry's greatest hardware designers and I would value her opinion on this. If you don't know who she is, her name is Limor Fried and she founded AdaFruit. I don't have current stats but from 2016: Revenue US$45 million (2016)[1] Number of employees 105 Front page of Make Magazine: https://blog.adafruit.com/2017/05/08/limor-ladyada-fried-on-the-cover-… Front page of Wired: https://www.wired.com/2011/03/wired-magazines-cover-features-its-first… Front page of Smore magazine: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3920 Front page of Hackspace: https://www.flickr.com/photos/adafruit/40061387915

In this case, however, the original author is not enforcing their copyright: https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/06/16/david-ahl-places-all-his-classic-…

Adafruit appears to still be supporting the Arduino IDE and ecosystem with their new boards. https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/04/20/new-guide-adafruit-esp32-s3-feath… "Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino."

That's fair, but they don't seem to have a great track record with the resellers either. https://blog.pimoroni.com/why-we-wont-be-selling-genuino-arduino-any-m… https://hackaday.com/2015/04/15/arduino-vs-arduino-the-resellers-conun… https://blog.adafruit.com/2017/08/02/arduino-federico-musto-will-pursu…

https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/01/15/the-secret-apple-m1-amx-apple-mat… The rumor I've heard is that Apple is keeping their custom extensions to the ISA undocumented in deference to ARM's desire not to have the instruction set just completely fragment into a bunch of mutually incompatible company-specific dialects. It's worth noting that the article you link predates the public release of the M1 by a good 10 months. Given how secretive Apple tends to be about these sorts of things, one can only assume that it was based almost entirely on rumor and conjecture.

This may be of help then: https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/02/01/using-a-raspberry-pi-zero-scsi-ad… Also worth looking at the alternative solutions as many USB adapters as well as dedicated SCSI<>SDcard had adapters about in the wild.

Nice piece and great work [1] - I will make a point to read all of your posts :) [1] https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/10/28/ask-hn-why-isnt-open-source-hardw…

good timing for this... we (adafruit) have been posting a post-per-day, all month for open hardware month. https://blog.adafruit.com/?s=%23OHM2019 there are millions of open-source hardware devices out there, so "popular" would need to be more defined for this question, etc. here are all the posts..

Somewhat related, Carlsberg had a beer pipeline running into Neils Bohr's house after he won the Nobel Prize: https://blog.adafruit.com/2012/11/11/niels-bohr-had-the-best-utility-c…

Next time, you should try some addressable LEDs. Neopixels, aka WS2811/12/12B, let you set the colors of individual bulbs instead of the entire strand. They work great with ESP8266! https://blog.adafruit.com/2015/06/30/updated-neopixel-support-for-esp8…

>It has connectors on all four sides and no screw holes for mounting There's three nuts soldered on the back: https://www.unihiker.com/wiki/dimension >That layout started with Arduino, continued into Raspberry Pi Pre-2010 Arduino boards had three 1/8 inch mounting holes, post-2010 ones had four: https://blog.adafruit.com/2011/02/28/arduino-hole-dimensions-drawing/ The Raspberry Pi 1 had two mounting holes located in stupid places, but the Pi 4 has four: https://www.robot-advance.com/userfiles/www.robot-advance.com/images/r… >Note how vague the site gets when they talk about applications. It's a DFRobot product. I used to work for a company that distributed DFRobot products in the US, and this is broadly consistent with their corporate philosophy. Their designers crank out thousands of products to keep ahead of other Shenzen companies who are fast-following them. (Notably Seeedstudio) You can view their full catalog here, and it's quite the sight to see: https://www.dfrobot.com/category-48.html They generally take the OEM reference design, put it on a pcb, and add connectors. The API will be minimal. Compatibility is a joke. (For instance, they make no effort to avoid I2C address collisions-- how could they, when most of them are hard-coded by the device vendor, and they only make the PCB? You have to be careful when stacking several different Arduino shields, since they'll very often be talking on the same pins. There will be no warning of…

> Dynamic websites is a core idea of the modern internet and that concept did not exist in 1994 internet. CGI and other forms of dynamicity absolutely existed in 1994[0]. > JavaScript did not exist. IT just needed 1 more year! > Modern internet is also real-time and largely community driven. Even the notion of these did not exist in 1994 internet. Check out MUDs and MOOs. Lambda was 3 years old in 1994. Wired called online virtual worlds "the addiction of the '90s[1]." > Websockets did not exist. But Berkeley sockets did (although you might have had to do some tinkering with Winsock on Windows!) , and I'm curious what you can do over a web socket that you can't do over a traditional socket. > Social networks did not exist. MUDs and mOOs again. > Video conferencing did not exist. Intel actually released a "kit" to enable this on regular Windows PCs in 1994. Cost a pretty penny though[2]! >Collaborative document editing did not exist. The first instance of a collaborative real-time editor was demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart in 1968, in The Mother of All Demos. Widely available implementations of the concept took decades to appear. A piece of software called Instant Update was released for the classic Mac OS in 1991 from ON Technology[3]. > The ideas of wearables and always connected devices (smart watches, speakers, thermostats, lights, etc) did not exist in 1994. Proto wearables absolutely existed in 1994[4]. X10 was developed in 1975 by Pico Electronics of…

I never had the Spinwelder but remember seeing it in the back of the Sears catalog. One of my favorite toys as a 70's kid, the Vertibird toy helicopter: http://www.timepassagesnostalgia.com/&searchkeywords=vertibird&… Like any good helicopter toy I was unable to fly it when I first woke up on Christmas and shoved the batteries in. You actually had to control the lift (not a collective but speed control on the rotor) and the pitch. Too much pitch and you lose lift so had to compensate with extra lift. By the New Years I was flying like a pro, swinging around and pulling back on the pitch to reverse thrust and stop over a dime.... My favorite "make stuff toys" of the 70's were my Erector set and Lego set of course. But then I also had this trippy Buckminster-Fuller-meets-Light-Bright building toy called an Astrolite: https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/01/16/vintage-toy-fun-astrolite-by-hasb…

Terrapin Logo for the Apple ][ and C64 came with a 6502 assembler written in Logo by Leigh Klotz, that they used to write Logo primitives (for controlling the turtle, etc). It would be ambitious to make a self hosting 6502 Logo meta assembler, by porting the entire 6502 assembly language Logo source code to the 6502 Logo Assembler! Leigh, wasn't the assembler that you used for the original Apple ][ version of Logo written in MacLisp running on a PDP-10? The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found (adafruit.com) 379 points by mmastrac on Oct 4, 2018 | hide | past | web | favorite | 89 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18142287 https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/10/04/the-apple-ii-source-code-for-the-… Lars: The link in the article to the code from https://github.com/PDP-10/its is broken. I found a few references to it in the repo. Did you have to take it down, or did you move it somewhere else? https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/a5694acbf9b6185a36d18d22631914ac406… >Logo >"I too see the computer presence as a potent influence on the human mind. I am very much aware of the holding power of an interactive computer and of how taking the computer as a model can influence the way we think about ourselves. In fact the work on LOGO to which I have devoted much of the past years consists precisely of developing such forces in positive directions." >Seymour Papert >"Logo is the name for a philosophy of education and for a…

Related: "You Bought Zuck’s Ray-Bans. Now Someone in Nairobi Is Watching You Poop." https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/03/04/you-bought-zucks-ray-bans-now-som…

Some background and other details are on the Adafruit blog: https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/04/29/tindie-is-back-online-and-now-own…

We have a winner: https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/08/any-user-who-has-a-3d-printer-wou…

> the site publishs full-text rss feeds with no blockers here, no ads: https://blog.adafruit.com/RSS hmmm > Sorry, you have been blocked. You are unable to access adafruit.com > Why have I been blocked? > This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. Someone is lying here

"Existing inventory will be sold through while supplies last. Once inventory is exhausted, no additional units will be restocked. We have put the remaining stock on sale." https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teensy-at-adafr…

Peak maternal performance: https://cdn-blog.adafruit.com/uploads/2026/01/bafkreiejprofnpspjse6rqw… Hotlinked from: https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/01/12/discontinuing-the-teensy-at-adafr…

I feel like the Qualcomm thing has just woken up a lot of people to how Arduino has been enshittifying for years They released their first closed source "pro" boards in 2021 https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/07/12/when-open-becomes-opaque-the-chan…

Drawing turtle bots have a history almost as long as Logo https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/05/03/the-history-of-turtle-bots-part-1…

Lady Ada is not impressed: https://blog.adafruit.com/2025/10/07/qualcomms-latest-ai-play-turning-… One of their key points is that the AI component is completely tied to the Qualcomm stack, the opposite of Open. Essentially the Arduino brand will live on as a marketing layer over Qualcomm hardware, which you will still need an NDA and significant volume to gain access to.

https://www.reddit.com/r/prusa3d/comments/1k0zsrx/1000_duty_on_xl_orde… Not the highest tariffs since it wasn’t from China. And a 170% tariff bill. https://blog.adafruit.com/2025/05/08/high-tariffs-become-real-with-our…

This is the same fellow who reverse engineered and cloned the Sound Blaster. https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/02/05/the-snark-barker-a-soundblaster-1…

Billy Idol was pretty early as well. He was on The Well in the early 90’s. https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/04/13/the-internet-is-punk-rock-the-sto…