Learning Electronics Merit Badges From Adafruit Industries

Adafruit Industries, the New York City firm founded by noted electronics maker and DIY evangelist Limor “Lady Ada” Fried, is releasing a series of merit badges that recognize a variety of electronics skills.

The first one is “learning to solder” – if you’re new to electronics, we’ll have a special bundle of tools, a kit and limited edition “badge” to show the world you’re proficient in soldering, once you complete the tutorials and kit that is!

We will have a variety of badges, the first is soldering – others include:

Arduino
LEDs (with conductive thread & real LED!)
Open source hardware
TV-B-Gone’ing
Reverse engineering
Dumpster diving
Laser cutting
WaveBubble

I’m especially looking forward to the LED merit badge, with conductive thread and a real LED. A micro-electronics project in patch form. Nifty!

Incidentally, Limor takes her “nom de souder” from Lady Ada Lovelace, aka Augusta Ada Byron, daughter of the infamous poet and libertine Lord Byron. Lady Ada is now known as the “first programmer” for having written, in 1842, a set of instructions to calculate Bernoulli numbers using Charles Babbage’s (unrealized) Analytical Engine.

See Previously:

– Nerd Merit Badges

– Laughing Squid Embroidered Patches

photo via Adafruit Industries