WDM Magazine

Maybe it wasn't intentional, but in 2002 Limor Fried ticked-off MIT's assistant dean with her 'little black box'. School security found it mounted to a girder in a parking garage. It had wires sticking out of it and a little note attached that described it as an "art project". In predictable post-9/11 fashion, there was no sense of humor about the art that could be "mistaken for a bomb", and in fact, the assistant dean wrote Fried a stern disciplinary letter. The letter said that calling the metal box an "art project" was a questionable claim because "art is not usually associated with electrical engineering".

The project managed to set Ms. Fried apart from the average electronic gear-head because of a subversive, techno-rebel nature even when she was still an undergrad. Fried eventually graduated with a Masters of Engineering from MIT and the Media Lab on the topic of Social Defense Mechanisms. Today, she continues to go her own road as the founder and lead engineer at Adafruit Industries.

Adafruit Industries describes itself as "a small company that sells kits and parts for original, open source hardware electronics projects". These kits are designed to help people learn how to build working electronic circuitry. Adafruit provides the circuit boards and instructions, then customers build the projects on their own.

Oddly useful designs include a Botanical's Twitter kit, which allows your houseplants a 'reach out' by detecting the moisture in the soil and relaying the information to a Twitter account. The do-it-yourselfer can build a fun electronic gadget, but as an educational tool for the next generation of engineers it is a great way to learn how to think about electronics for everything from agriculture to climate change. "Anybody can build products to sell on the open market," says Make magazine's Creative Director, Phillip Torrone, a distributor of Adafruit Industries' kits, "but Adafruit wants to teach people about electronics."

Teaching is a natural inclination for Ms. Fried, and if you wish to learn how to hack a SIM card, you can find her 'how to' video on the Internet. Fried and Torrone explain, in very simple terms, what the SIM card is and how to penetrate its code.

Limor Fried goes by the alias Lady Ada and publishes a blog for rants as well as announces new kits on Ladyada.net. "Lady Ada" is a reference to an historical figure from the early 1800's, Ada Byron, who wrote a plan for how an engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. This plan is now regarded as the first "computer program". A software language that was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense was named "Ada" in her honor back in 1979.

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