No one should ever be forced to create a PCB in Fritzing, but it does have its own very limited place. As a PCB design tool, it’s lacking creating parts from scratch is far too hard, and there’s no way to get around the grid snap tool. Fritzing is an important piece of software, if only for being a great way to create graphics of breadboard circuits. I want to do Fritzing for this Creating A PCB In Everything series only to demonstrate how bad PCB design can be.įor the next few thousand words, I am going to combine a tutorial for Fritzing with a review of Fritzing. You can also make a PCB in Fritzing, and here things aren’t as great. Fritzing has no other equal in this respect, and for this purpose, it’s an excellent tool. It should be unacceptable that I can even tell they’re designed in Fritzing.įritzing has its place, and that place is building graphical representations for breadboard circuits. I see amateur boards built in every tool, and without exception, the worst are always designed in Fritzing. EE professors, TAs, or Chris Gammell might beat me on volume, but they’re only looking at boards made by students using one tool. You may scoff at this, but think about it: simply due to my vocation, I look at a lot of PCBs made by amateurs. I am, perhaps, the world’s leading expert at assessing poorly designed and just plain shitty PCBs. Just because a piece of software is important doesn’t mean it’s good. It was the inspiration for CircuitLab, and the Fritzing influence can easily be seen in Autodesk’s 123D Circuits. The story of the ‘maker movement’ – however ill-defined that phrase is – cannot be told without mentioning Fritzing. Despite what the Fritzing’s Wikipedia talk page claims, Fritzing is an important piece of software. Simply by virtue of being an editor for Hackaday, I have seen thousands of homebrew PCBs, and tens of thousands of amateur and hobbyist electronics projects. I feel it is necessary to contextualize Fritzing in the space of ‘maker movement’, DIY electronics, and the last decade of Hackaday. It is frequently compared to Processing, Wiring, or Arduino in that it provides an easy way for artists, creatives, or ‘makers’ to dip their toes into the waters of PCB design. We’re done with Eagle, and now it’s time to move onto Fritzing.įritzing came out of the Interaction Design Lab at the University of Applied Sciences of Potsdam in 2007 as a project initiated by Professor Reto Wettach, André Knörig and Zach Eveland. Ive been using eagle for a little while and although im able to make layouts etc pretty well i recently found that i was running into problems due to board size (pin count was fine but i just wanted to spread things over a larger area for enclosures and so forth).This week, we’re continuing our Creating A PCB In Everything series, where we go through the steps to create a simple, barebones PCB in different EDA suites. anyway after doing my head in trying to work out eagles ridiculous upgrade paths not to mention the cost i decided to give diptrace a go. Ive only been fiddling around with diptrace the last day or so and it seems to be pretty good however theres one thing that is annoying me. in eagle's schematic layout when i add a DIP package for say TL072 it actually placed a dip package with all the pins, i prefer it this way. however in Diptrace it places 2 different sections to the IC as well as a separate power and ground section. Is there a way to globally change this to just show the IC as 1 part on my layout? i hope im making sense if not i can probably upload some photos when i get back in the lab to further explain ie it shows 1 Dip package as three separate 'parts' or what not in the schematic editor. While there might not be a single right answer for every occasion, some kind of structured approach will beat a mass of undifferentiated pins every time. You could separate the component into e.g. power inputs as one part and each I/O bank into separate parts. Or some other scheme based on what you want to highlight in the schematic. I tend to have multiple symbols for parts like these, and pick the one that seems most appropriate for the case. Another pet frustration of mine is the habit of some people in drawing logic components. Elementary gates are shovelheads and all else is blank boxes with nothing whatsoever to indicate the inner workings of the chip. Its almost like nobody ever heard of IEC and the symbol presentation standard.
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