Simon Monk - Fritzing for Inventors: Take Your Electronics Project from Prototype to Product

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To Matthew,
from a very proud Dad.

Dr. Simon Monk (Preston, UK) has a degree in cybernetics and computer science and a Ph.D. in software engineering. He spent several years as an academic before he returned to industry, co-founding the mobile software company, Momote Ltd. He has been an active electronics hobbyist since his early teens and is a full-time writer on hobby electronics and open-source hardware. Dr. Monk is the author of numerous electronics books, specializing in open-source hardware platforms, especially Arduino and Raspberry Pi. He is also co-author with Paul Scherz of Practical Electronics for Inventors, Third Edition.

You can follow him on Twitter, where he is @simonmonk2.

M any thanks to all those at McGraw-Hill who have done such a great job in producing this book. In particular, thanks to my editors Roger Stewart and Michael McCabe, and to Patty Wallenburg.

I am most grateful to Andr Knrig for his technical review of the material.

And, last but not least, thanks once again to Linda, for her patience and generosity in giving me space to do this.

F or many makers and electronics hobbyists, the idea of using computer-aided design (CAD) software conjures up images of obscure and difficult-to-use programs that might need a weeks training course before you can do anything useful with them. Fritzing is not like that. Fritzing has been designed and has developed for makers, hobbyists, and inventors, not for professional electronic engineers.

This high-speed tour of Fritzing will give you an idea of the breadth of this tool. It is useful just to know what features are available, even if you are not going to use them right away. Many of the things mentioned in the following short summary will be dealt with in considerably greater detail later in the book, so please dont feel cheated.

Fritzing is so easy to use that many people use it to sketch out breadboard layouts or draw schematic diagrams, as this can be accomplished almost as easily as with pen and paper. This ease of use does not mean that Fritzing is only of use for simple example projects. It is perfectly possible to design quite complex projects with Fritzing, without having to compromise on the design. The key advantages of Fritzing over other CAD tools are as follows:

It is free to use (although a donation is appreciated).

It is simple and intuitive.

Fritzing includes many libraries of components from popular suppliers such as Adafruit, Sparkfun, and Snootlabs.

It is suitable for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone, and Spark Core projects.

Fritzing is an integrated printed circuit board (PCB) production service. Or export the files and use another service.

shows one of the example projects supplied with Fritzing.

FIGURE 1-1 A Fritzing example project (Breadboard view).

The first thing that may come as a surprise, if you have used other CAD systems, is that the first view of the project is a Breadboard view. Fritzing assumes that you will want to make a prototype of your project on solderless breadboard to get all the wrinkles out of it before you move on to making a PCB. Most CAD systems completely ignore the concept of prototyping on breadboard, but in Fritzing, it is a fundamental part of the design process.