The first is to create a breadboard circuit, the second is to turn that into a schematic, and the last is turning that schematic into a board. There are three steps to creating a PCB in Fritzing. Step 1: Create Your Board On A Breadboard No one should use Fritzing to create a PCB, anyway, much less create their own parts from scratch. It’s far too much effort for far too little payoff.
#Fritzing vs eagle how to#
I will not be demonstrating how to make a part in Fritzing. This is unnecessarily complex for any EDA suite. Save that as an SVG, go into Fritzing, edit an existing package, do the macarena, sacrifice a goat on the night of the blood moon, and eventually, you’ll have your completely custom Fritzing part.
#Fritzing vs eagle download#
First, you need to download Inkscape, draw your package with pins and pads and text on an unreasonable number of layers. The parts already in the Fritzing library got there somewhere, but recreating the efforts of the devs is a pain. Of course, you can create new parts in Fritzing, and that blog post saying you can’t is an oversimplification. Packages can be edited into new parts, and most jellybean components have drop-down menus for different values in the parts library, the through-hole resistor is a 220 Ω, but there’s a drop-down menu for the most common values you’ll need. This is from a blog post highlighting the new Parts Editor released in version 0.7.9. You cannot create completely new parts in Fritzing. It’s the mindset required for any hacker or maker philosophy, and necessary for anything that bills itself as an engineering tool, because sometimes youarethe first person to use a particular part. You do not know how to use a PCB design tool unless you know how to make a part for yourself - what you own owns you, self-sufficiency, and all that jazz. Does Fritzing come with an ATtiny85? Yes, it does, but that’s not the point.
No one should ever be forced to create a PCB in Fritzing, but it does have its own very limited place.Īs with all tutorials in this Making A PCBseries, I would like to start off by making a part, specifically an ATtiny85.
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 thisCreating A PCB In Everythingseries 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 eventellthey’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 ata lotof PCBs made by amateurs.
I am, perhaps, the world’s leading expert at assessing poorly designed and just plain shitty PCBs.
#Fritzing vs eagle software#
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. This week, we’re continuing our Creating A PCB In Everythingseries, where we go through the steps to create a simple, barebones PCB in different EDA suites.