As you will know I have written a book about the ESP32. It is in Dutch and undoubtedly you want to buy it for which you can find a link at the bottom of this page. In this book there are breadboard schematics which are designed with Fritzing. While using Fritzing extensively I stumbled upon a feature I did not know existed, and never have seen being used before.
I designed a small stripboard setup for neopixels which consist of some capacitors for stabilising the power supply and a resistor for attaching to the datalines. There is an USB connector on the board for supplying the power. You can read about this in my intro story about neopixels which you can re-read here: http://lucstechblog.blogspot.com/2015/10/neopixels-ws2812-intro.html
And I desgned a small stripboard for a DS18B20 thermometer chip.
Sidenote: thermometers are stupid. The internet of things is paved with thermometers and weather stations and I don't have a clue why everyone is building them. Presumably it's because they don't have anything better to make. Lack of creativity and fantasy. When I look outside my window I can see that it is raining or not and I can feel if it is cold or hot. I do not need a thermometer or weatherstation for that.
The only reason I think a thermometer is interesting is because it is a constant source of data which I can use for testing purposes.
So for the sake of this demonstration let us suppose that I am going to build a thermometer that displays the temperature on a strip of neopixels. Something like: below 20 degrees the pixels are blue and above the pixels are red.
What would I need.
Well a microcontroller like an Attiny85 or a Wemos D1
A Dallas DS18B20 thermometer chip with a pull-up resistor
A strip of neopixels.
Hey by coincedence I have designed two small stripboards with these items which I can use as a kind of building blocks. But they are all in separate Fritzing files.
Well here comes the trick.
First open Fritzing and start a new Breadboard setup. Put a Half breadboard on it and then put a Wemos D1 on that.
Open a new file. My version is in Dutch but just choose File and New.
In this new screem open the DS18B20 stripboard
Select the DS18B20 stripboard with all its components and just drag it onto the other window.
Do the same for the Neopixels stripboard
The last step is to select with your mouse one by one the stripboard with their parts and rotate them.
I realise that in reality you (and I) work the other way round. First you build the project and then you make the Fritzing schematics. However Fritzing is great for documenting your projects like I am doing on this weblog.
I have used Fritzing for a long time now but never knew that it was so easy to bring parts from one design into another project. This works with stripboards and with breadbords. And it also works by choosing just parts of your design and transporing them to another board.
Till next time.
Keep experimenting you never know what you might find.
Luc Volders
