Adafruit, Sparkfun point to the democratization of hardware

One of the not-so-obvious side benefits of the miniaturization of electronics is that folks far removed from the realm of electronic engineering become comfortable with small electronic devices and think, “Wouldn’t it be neat if I had a [gizmo] that did…?” Back when computers were called “workstations” their inner workings seemed mysterious, complex, and expensive, and few consumers thought about how they could exploit the computational power. But now that the equivalent of a workstation fits into a hand-sized smartphone complete with a rechargeable power source and a high-definition screen,  software creation is appealing to a non-technical audience. There’s an app for seemingly everything, and even 10-year olds are creating them.

Similarly, hardware itself is becoming open. A decade ago distributors like Avnet and Arrow began to create their own corps of application engineers whose job was to intermediate between a manufacturer’s new, increasingly-complex products and a customer who wanted to solve a design problem, not necessarily become expert in a highly-specialized IC. Fast-forward to the present and a new breed of electronics supplier is emerging to facilitate the “democratization of hardware” – that is, the use of hardware in new designs by non-technical people.

One of the leaders in this niche of suppliers is SparkFun, which was started by a newly-minted EE from the University of Colorado, Nathan Seidle, to scratch his own itch. He was looking for a source of small quantities of sometimes-obscure electronic parts. However, after he began offering these parts, he received questions from customers on how to use them. Putting up tutorials made for a virtuous cycle as the tutorials served as link-bait, drawing in new, often non-technical, customers who found the company through Google.

Seidle contrasts the thinking of professionally trained engineers and nontechies: “I’ve seen a lot of senior projects in the university EE department, and they are all very good and very technical. And they all have to do with some kind of solar tracker or a digital music player or a power supply. But in the digital media classes, [the art students] are doing the most amazing, ridiculous, beautiful things with the same electronics. It’s important to show creative people that they can achieve a grand project— and, yes, it has some current and voltage, but don’t worry about that. We’ll teach you that part.” This is the opposite of a traditional EE educational approach, which is: We’ll give you the technical background, and after a couple of years you can implement your grand ideas—if you remember what they were.

Similarly, Adafruit got into the parts/kit business with its detailed tutorials that include step-by-step instructions and photographs to lead newbies through the basics of Ohm’s Law and soldering, and on to programming the open-source hardware Arduino platform. Unlike traditional electronic distributors that rely on application engineers, the site effectively crowdsources its application engineering support through its forums and FAQ pages on the kits and parts. This reliance on the knowledge of the site’s fans is part of a well-thought-out business plan: Adafruit’s founder, Limor Fried, detailed the company philosophy in, “15 steps to starting your own electronic-kit business.”

Individual parts offered by Adafruit benefit from its excellent documentation and  tutorials. Speaking from personal experience, a couple of years ago I bought a TLS2561 light-to-digital converter from TAOS Semiconductor (now part of austriamicrosystems.) It seemed like a handy component to have in getting a quick, objective measurement of LEDs. However, although documentation existed for the part, its outputs were hard to interpret and it was not easy to hook it up to a computer for datalogging. I quickly gave up and forgot about it.

Then, last summer Adafruit introduced the a new product, aTLS2561 premounted on a small pc board with
a couple of chip resistors and some headers, with a tutorial as well as a software library for the open-source Arduino platform. As the Adafruit tutorial says, “To use this sensor and calculate Lux, there’s a lot of very hairy and unpleasant math. You can check out the math in the datasheet but really, it’s not intuitive or educational – it’s just how the sensor works. So we took care of all the math and wrapped it up into a nice Arduino library.”

My sentiments exactly – I just wanted to start using the sensor. It worked great. (See photo, which shows a boarduino, a slimmed-down version of the arduino.) Adafruit was able to take a part that sells competitively for about $2 each, add a couple of passive components, and a well thought-out online tutorial, and sell it for $12. And it was worth every penny of it to me.

Digi-Key had a similar start back in 1972, selling its “Digi-Keyer Kit” to ham radio enthusiasts and today it’s a $1B company. History could repeat itself with a whole new generation of parts and kits providers.