Notice that you can move the parts anywhere, but that isn’t such a good idea when designing a PCB. Next thing I did was resize the PCB to fit the Arduino pins so I can make this an Arduino shield, which is a PCB that plugs in on top of an Arduino. (I had to leave again, but this time I closed Fritzing before closing my laptop.)
FRITZING LOGO WINDOWS
One thing I noticed when recovering the file is that for some strange reason it was saving my work in the Windows downloads directory, so I created a new directory under C:\Fritzing\mySketches and moved my files there. ( Yeah!) It took a while to get back in business, but again the price is right and frankly I’m having fun with Fritzing.
I renamed the file just in case, and as luck would have it I was able to recover the work. MAY HAVE!? I WANT MY MONEY BACK! (Okay, let’s take a deep breath, remember the price and that it is beta, and see what we can recover.) I removed the battery to reset it and after taking forever to completely reboot, I got the message in Figure 10 suggesting the Fritzing may have crashed. So, I waited 10 minutes hoping the microspirits would work some magic. What I did was close my laptop to take somewhere with me and when I opened the laptop back up - NOTHING! Just a black screen and a forlorn arrow cursor that my mouse wouldn’t move. Although, this was a little more than a minor inconvenience.
FRITZING LOGO SOFTWARE
this is free software in beta release, so I’ll just live with this minor inconvenience and move on. Oh, the humanity! The blood was ankle deep. Obviously, the default PCB is too large so we want to adjust it, and then. In Figure 9, we see the parts placed on the corner of the default PCB. And by sense, in this case, I mean that the parts are easiest to connect with PCB ‘wires.’ This routing of the wires is a skill that comes with lots of practice where you try what seems most logical, then rip up (delete the wire) and retry until you get something that seems optimal to you. Your goal here is similar to what you did with the schematic: You want to move the parts on the PCB so that the layout makes sense. You’ll get a raw layout something like what you see in Figure 8. To open the PCB layout window, click on the PCB button shown in Figure 7. To me, the image in Figure 6 represents a typical way to show a design in a schematic format. This is not just about design it is also about the very important and often underserved aspect of design: the documentation. You may want to play around with this a bit, but keep in mind that your goal is not only to connect the parts, but to generate a schematic image that visually explains how the circuit is connected. Similar to how you drew the wires on the breadboard, you use your mouse to grab a part connection point and stretch a line to the other end of the connection (refer to Figure 5). Those lines represent the part connections that you made in the breadboard. Notice that as you move the parts around, tiny lines stick to the parts and stretch or contract a bit like a virtual rubberband. Now, let’s move the parts to the positions that will facilitate adding the wires as shown in Figure 4. You’ll see the schematic window with the schematic version of the breadboard parts scattered about as shown in Figure 3. The next thing you need to do is click on the Schematic button as shown in Figure 2. To get things rolling, the breadboard illustration from last month is shown in Figure 1.įIGURE 1. It is the clarity that the Fritzing drawings give that make this tool so popular. You’ll see lots of Arduino projects on the Internet that use Fritzing for documentation. However, Fritzing is unique (as far as I know) in that it also lets you draw the circuit first on a breadboard that then automatically generates the schematic and PCB drawings.įor those of us who prototype with breadboards, this gives us not only an intuitive entry into the design, but it produces excellent drawings that we can use for documenting our projects. One thing to remember while going through all this is that Fritzing is but one among many open source hardware design tools that let you draw schematics and generate PCB files. Then - still using Fritzing - we’ll convert it into a printed circuit board (PCB) layout that we will have manufactured for us by SparkFun’s BatchPCB service.
FRITZING LOGO HOW TO
This time, we'll see how to take that breadboard prototype and generate a schematic design. We saw how we can use Fritzing to design the prototype for it on a breadboard. In our last episode, I introduced Fritzing - a novice-friendly hardware design package that we are using to design a real time clock shield for an Arduino.