Fritzing is a really underappreciated piece of software. Because it is easy to use, it is being used by a lot of people who don’t necessarily yet know what they are doing. And since the graphics generated with Fritzing are easily recognizable, it has become associated with horrible designs and it is really unfair, because being easy to use is an advantage, and it really lets you do great stuff.
Fritzing is the only PCB CAD software that actually uses open standards, instead of inventing its own formats. It works natively with SVG, lets you import and export SVGs, the saved projects are simply ZIP files with SVGs inside, as well as the custom parts. Thanks to its breadboard view, it’s also very good for planning your designs for protoboards.
If you don’t want to wait for the parts bins to load,
With that being said let’s delve in tips and tricks you may not know about Fritzing.
Searching for a specific part
if you don’t know which bin the parts belong in but you do know the name of the part, you can search for it. If you don’t find the part, you need go to the next tip.
Can’t find the part you need?
You can make your own parts. For a step-by-step guide, check out this Instructable. You can find other user-created parts at the Fritzing user-created parts Google code repository.
Preference for tangled wires
By default Fritzing wires are straight, which can lead to pretty messy and unrealistic looking Fritzing images. However you can enable curly wires and legs, as shown. This makes your pictures look more like the real circuit, and allows you to route wires around things so the wires don’t look tangled.
Grabbing the wrong parts
When you have a lot of parts and wires, oftentimes it’s hard to grab the right parts or wires without unintentionally changing your image in a different way. One way to prevent this is to lock parts. This way the parts you don’t want to move stay where they are, while you make delicate tweaks to your image.
Hope you learnt a thing or two about using Fritzing. Do share with us your personal tips in using Fritzing and lets build together.
