Limor Fried is an American Electrical engineer born in the United States. There is no information on when she was born, brought up attended junior schools. According to Redtfledt (2013), Limor Fried’s in her childhood liked “liked taking things apart, figuring out how they worked and building something that she can share with others” (Pg. 1). Fried also liked building, tweaking and modifying electronic devices with the aim of creating her own gadgets that appear unique from the existing once. It is on this reason that she choose Engineering as the only career that could allow her continue with her childhood aspirations.
Her dream since childhood was to join Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when she grew up. This was because while in MA high school, she frequently visited MIT and admired the challenging environment, and availability of free internet connection which she was interested in. as a result, though she was initially admitted as a computer science major student at Boston University, she transferred to MIT EECS in her junior class to acquire more knowledge in electrical engineering. She ended up earning a bachelor’s degree in Electrical and computer science. When she started her master’s degree, Fried engaged in assembling unique gadgets during late hours and selling them online, while sharing her designs freely with other students at the University. Her role model was the Moniker ‘Ladyada’, the first female mathematician and computer programmer in the 19th century. As a result, when she started her own company, she named it Adafruit Industries (Redtfledt, 2013).
Since the starting up Adafruit industries, she has made it a leader in open-source hardware industry, with her being the CEO. In 2013, the entrepreneur magazine named her the entrepreneur of the year. in 2012, she was the first ever woman to feature on the front cover of Wired Magazine, apart from being named as the most influential woman in the technology industry. She also received a Pioneer Award in 2009 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Her company, Adafruit industries has over 45 employees and mainly sells Kits, which helps individuals their own electronic devices with open-source licenses. In her company, Fried encourages her customers to keep on modifying her final products. In this regard, she focuses on teaching engineering to the world through her company. Some of the products Fried has developed include “MiniPOV, whose LED display makes words appear to be floating in air, and the Minty MP3 player, which fits inside an Altoids tin. (A version of the latter, the MintyBoost Kit — an Altoids tin-based charger for portable devices — is now Adafruit’s best-seller, with more than 50,000 units sold” (Matheson, 2014 Pg. 2).
Apart from producing kits, original devices and producing a number of guides online, Fried through Adafruit, Fried works with schools, teachers, libraries, as well as community technology labs called hackerspaces in promoting Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education globally. This is especially in developing curriculums in subjects like circuitry and electronics. Through this, Fried aims at accomplishing her mission of inspiring every individual to become a maker and entrepreneur (Matheson, 2014).
