Limor Fried
Founder & Engineer at Adafruit Industries
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inInternet of Things (IoT) Development and Prototyping
Limor Fried is the founder and chief engineer behind Adafruit, a woman-owned maker-focused hardware company she started after graduating MIT and has grown into a 100+ person NYC manufacturer and learning platform. With 18 years leading product design, open-source hardware and embedded software, she combines low-level firmware expertise—contributing heavily to CircuitPython, UF2/tinyuf2 bootloaders, display and sensor Arduino libraries—and hands-on selection and testing of every product sold. Her work spans bootloaders, graphics drivers, sensor drivers, NeoPixel and RTC libraries, and Raspberry Pi integration, reflecting deep competence in MCU platforms from SAMD to ESP32 and RP2040. A visible public technologist—first female engineer on WIRED’s cover and a White House Champion of Change—she pairs community education with pragmatic engineering and manufacturing at scale. Not obvious from headlines: she still commits code to core embedded toolchains and graphics libraries used by hobbyists and professionals worldwide.
18 years of coding experience
Master of Engineering - MEng, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Master of Engineering - MEng, Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Github Skills (115)
adafruit10
displays10
il10
servo10
python10
gps10
firmware10
server-configuration10
spi10
c1110
neopixel10
integrations10
digital-logic10
c1710
gamepad10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
adafruit/TFTLCD-Library
Jan 2011 - Feb 2020
Arduino library for 8-bit TFT LCDs such as ILI9325, ILI9328, etc
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:69 commits, 3 PRs, 5 pushes in 9 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Limor focused on developing and improving the Adafruit TFT LCD library, a library for interacting with TFT LCD displays, particularly those using the ILI9325, ILI9328, and HX8357D drivers. They implemented and refined drawing primitives, including lines, rectangles, circles, and text, and optimized low-level pin operations. They also added support for new display controllers (HX8357D, ILI9341) and integrated functionality for loading and displaying BMP images from SD cards.
arduino-library
adafruit/Adafruit-ST7735-Library
May 2011 - Dec 2022
This is a library for the Adafruit 1.8" SPI display http://www.adafruit.com/products/358 and http://www.adafruit.com/products/618
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:11 releases, 7 reviews, 118 commits in 11 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Limor primarily contributed to the development of a library for the Adafruit ST7735 and ST7789 TFT displays. Their work involved adding support for various display types, including black tab and 1.44" displays, and addressing color inversion issues. They also implemented the rotation feature for pixels, lines, and fast lines, showcasing a focus on display functionality and optimization for different screen configurations. Furthermore, the user created example code for displaying bitmaps from an SD card, demonstrating integration with external storage.
adafruitspiarduino-library
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