FRITZING

Designing a circuit to interface to a Raspberry Pi or Arduino? Then grab a copy of the open source Fritzing package. Mike Bedford is your guide.

Credit: www.fritzing.org

OUR EXPERT

Mike Bedford had previously heard for Fritzing but, until recently, hadn’t delved into it. However, he assures us he’ll most definitely be using it a lot more in the future.

B uilding an electronic circuit – perhaps for interfacing external devices to a single board computer like a Raspberry Pi or Arduino – is commonly carried out on a breadboard. This might be as far as you need to go, but if you’re building the circuit as part of a practical project, then breadboarding is just the start. It really needs to be rebuilt in some other form for use in a real-world project. Alternative methods of electronic construction involve either using a stripboard if you’re only going to build a single circuit, or a printed circuit board (PCB) if you either need to build several or if you want to publish your design for others to build.

Fritzing is an electronic CAD package that was designed for electronics enthusiasts and the maker community. It provides three different views of a circuit – breadboard or stripboard design, the schematic, and the PCB layout – and enables you to switch between them. What’s more, making changes in one view results in those changes also being reflected in the other views.

Mostly free

Fritzing is unusual in that, even though it’s open source, the executable code can no longer be downloaded freely from the Fritzing website (www.fritzing.org). Instead, you can only download it (for Windows, Mac or Linux) if you support the project by making a contribution of at least 8 Euro. If this goes against the grain, you can compile the source code yourself from Github or, if you don’t feel confident to do that, you might find it in your repository. We were able to install it from the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS repository, but only a beta version.

Fritzing ships with a library of components, but if your design uses one that isn’t included, you can add your own component definition to the library.

With a breadboard layout defined, you can move on to document your design as a schematic or, alternatively, you can start by defining a circuit in the Schematic View.

It seems that the most common way in which Fritzing is used – and the intention of its designers at the University of Applied Sciences in Postdam, Germany – is to enter the circuit as an arrangement of components on a previously built and proven breadboard design, and then convert it to a schematic and/or a PCB design. While this is the established method that’s been adopted by the maker community, it’s not the way professional electronics engineers work; starting with a schematic diagram, move on to testing it, modify the schematic after prototyping, and finally generate a PCB design. Both methods are supported by Fritzing, but it’s useful to take a look at the pros and cons of each approach.