Fritzing is for me at this moment still the best program for aiding with my projects documentation. You will have seen a lot of breadboard designs and schematics made with Fritzing on this weblogt. I already gave you two valuable tips on Fritzing in previous articles.
The first one was that you could print your designs and overlay them one-on-one on your breadboard. You can re-read that story here: http://lucstechblog.blogspot.com/2019/01/fritzing-projects-duplicated-easy.html
The second tip showed how you could merge several fritzing designs in one. Great for using building blocks in your designs. Re-read that story here: http://lucstechblog.blogspot.com/2019/08/fritzing-merger-of-boards.html
For those who have never used Fritzing before I really recommend it. Check it out and use it to document all of your projects. Fritzing is free to use and can be downloaded here:
http://fritzing.org/home/
Fritzing Parts.
Fritzing is as said a great tool. Fritzing however depends on hobbyists like you and me to add parts to it's library. And new parts emerge every day. Next to that not all hobbyists who use Fritzing will use all the parts. So sometimes you will stumble upon a part you want to use which is not yet in Fritzing's library. What to do.
Well first there is the option of using Fritzing itself to design a new part. It involves tedious work in a drawing program (like Inkscape), being very accurate with measurements and have a great compassion for designing in general.
Not my cup of tea. Sorry. I would love to be patience enough to design new parts but I just cant bring myself to it.
So what to do.
Sometime ago I stumbled upon this 4 7-segment display which I wanted to use in a project. The item name was TM1637 and there was no Fritzing library part for it. However I wanted to document my project. So what to deo.
Well actually there is a way to get a picture of the part into Fritzing. It will not be in your parts library but you can use it anyway.
First start with taking a picture of the part.
Now clean it up. I use the Gimp for editing my photo's but you can use any photo manipulation program you like. When done save it as JPG.
Open Fritzing in Breadboard mode and go to the parts bin. Select the core parts.
And scroll down to the breadboard parts.
Select the last Icon. That is the icon for importing pictures. Drag it to your workspace.
Click on the icon on your workspace and look at the inspector. In the inspector select your picture.
Ok. Ok. from the above pictures you can see why I am not good at designing parts. Just look at those crummy arrows.......
That is it.
Now you can use the part like any other part from the fritzing library. There are however some restrictions.
- Every time you want to use the part you will have to load it again
- After loading you will have to resize it.
- No pinnumbers with descriptions will be shown
- The part is not up to real-life scale
I can live with these restrictions and just am glad I found a way to import non-library items.
Till next time
Have fun
Luc Volders
