Recently, I’ve been spending a bit of time with Fritzing. It’s a piece of software that allows you to document prototypes, design circuits and manufacture PCBs. So far, I have only used the breadboard view to generate wiring diagrams for my Arduino and Sensors class, but I am still very impressed.
One of the circuits in my class involves wiring an accelerometer and a switch to an Arduino. Here was my attempt to photograph the circuit:
From the photograph, it’s not very clear on how to wire the accelerometer. There are too many wires in the photograph and it’s not easy to see where each wire terminates. Of course, I could try to recreate this circuit using wires with less slack, but there is a simpler solution – use Fritzing! The image generated by Fritzing makes it much easier to understand how the accelerometer is wired:
It’s fast and simple to generate the wiring diagrams. Fritzing has a bunch of predefined components (such as breadboards, switches, resistors and Arduinos) that you can drag and drop together. There’s also a great snap-to-grid functionality that ensures that components are connected. Fritzing allows you to import component libraries from other vendors so that you can prototype with correct representations of the components. For example, the accelerometer object comes from the Adafruit Fritzing library.
I’m really glad to see that there are excellent open-source tools available for this kind of thing. It makes sharing knowledge much easier. I’m already impressed by the breadboarding functionality, so I am looking forward to tinkering with the schematic and PCB views!
