Creating parts with movable schematic elements

I think the suffix change is probably Fritzing. Experience tells me that Inkscape deals with dups by reverting to the original name of the element (i.e. setting connector0pni on two different rectangles will cause the oldest to go from connector0pin to rect3848) or just as possibly a new name it just made up but not as far as I know via suffixes. As noted I have been bitten by this one in Inkscape …

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If I remembered right, the suffix was add when I exported the image from CorelDraw as an .svg, when I had duplicated ID name. So I thought I would see if my brain was still working… “no comment please” :slight_smile: and test it out. Below I entered id=“subpart3” three times, you can see how it added the suffix to the last two. Although, I don’t have any idea why NoodleDriver’s file was like that, but I do know CorelDraw does it this way. All programs are different, I am not familiar with Inkscape and FZ has some weird idiosyncrasies…

id="subpart3"
id="subpart3_0"
id="subpart3_1"

Computers don’t make mistakes… People do… It just takes computers to really screw things up… :confounded:

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CA3046
Transistor Array

CA3046.fzpz (6.6 KB)

CD4066 CMOS Quad Bilateral Switch

CD4066.fzpz (198.8 KB)

http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/cd4066b.pdf

Hi Guys,
Wow how did I miss this thread? Sorry I wasn’t around to lend a hand! Welcome to sub-part hell @NoodleDriver! As you have seen already the real acid test with these is creating a couple of real life circuits with them. You quickly learn where the gotchas are. If you have any remaining queries I’d be happy to help.
I am really impressed, you’ve created some awesome parts and so quickly! It tooks me forever just to get the first one working.
Stephen

Hi sgparry,

Thanks, I’m glad you like the parts!

The first one is always the hardest! This was worth learning. Making simple parts is a lot more clear now.
I still strugle with the PCB layer but luckily, I rarely need to do anything on that layer. Lack of practice most likely.
Anyway, I lost a big file today :frowning:
I finished it last night then decided to rename the folder this morning. DOH!
I can’t, for the life of me, get it to open now and the part I created for this project has vanished from my parts folder.
Luckily, I can open some of the earlier save points that I made along the way so not all is lost :smiley:
I have discovered a new problem with my Fritzing insallation now;
The search tab is missing. I tried resarting the program but no luck there.
So I will now uninstall and reinstall it but first I want to back up my parts on here :smiley:
All of my Multi-parts are here already so the rest are just regular oddball parts.

1P4T Switch.fzpz (5.1 KB)
CA3046.fzpz (6.6 KB)
CA3080.fzpz (5.7 KB)
LT44 Transformer.fzpz (5.7 KB)
MPF102.fzpz (5.5 KB)
OTA.fzpz (9.0 KB)
TL072.fzpz (13.3 KB)
CD4066.fzpz (198.8 KB)
TL074 Quad Opamp (Movable).fzpz (8.9 KB)
Some of these are slightly messy looking but they all work! I have tested all* of these on my own PCB projects…
*I have not tested the 3080 yet TBH but it looks perfect.

edit: The 3080 works like a charm :smiley:
More parts to follow below…

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Well, the reinstall worked out ok but it did’t restore the parts search for me.
I now have now way to find parts easily.
I should probably start a new thread for this but I thought I would update here anyway.

Are you running windows 10? There seems to be a problem there. This thread has a suggestion (but note you need to save the directories as it will delete all you work!) on how to clear the data directories which may restore it. I’m starting to wonder if a Win10 update has broken something on Win10.

also note Old_Grey’s suggestion on AV perhaps eating files. I assume that search did work for you before something happened (which points at corruption in the temp directories)?

Peter

Hi Peter,
Thanks for this!
Yes, the search was working on Win10 for me perfectly until today.
It happened whilst I was trying to recovre that sketch.
I had just used it succesfully then next time I tried it the tab was there but it was broken. I reloaded the program and the tab was gone.
This fix sounds like it could cause even more problems if it corrupts my sketches.
I haven’t tried opening any others yet but I shudder to thinkj there could be problems with devices I have already built! Oh no! I will make do without search for a while :smiley:
Cheers, Kevin.

Possible suggestions:

  • rebuild parts database
    if that does not work try:
  • exit Fritz
  • delete C:\Users\your-user-name\AppData\Roaming\Fritzing\bins\search.fzb; can only be seen when you have all the hide system files turned off and show hidden files turned on.
    Also, you may need to move your latest parts ‘out of the way’, as a flaw in their metadata may be frakking the search.
    You can also try turning on logging from the help menu and see if you can spot the error that is breaking the search.

It shouldn’t cause more problems as long as you keep a copy of the two directories, my warning was aimed at not having you delete the directories (which is what I often do while making parts with the production directories safely copied elsewhere) and losing your work. Fritzing (at least for me) is perfectly happy to start using the old directories again once I move them back in to place, It keeps most of its user based files in those two directories (there are also some true temp files in local\Temp but I don’t think they are used past the current session and I have never had to delete them although ccleaner will do so.) so it may be worth a try. I just now fired up a Win10 disk on my second machine (I love swappable disk trays :slight_smile: ) to see if I can reproduce the search problems other folks are having on Win10 so I may have more news a bit later. If you can, you may want to export all your created parts as fzpz files and back them up to for instance a thumb drive so you have a copy completely independent of Fritzing (I worked in a University data center for 20+ years and am paranoid about backups because they are out to get me :slight_smile: and I’ve seen a number of bad disasters.

Peter

On this one, have you run a chkdsk on the drive the folder is on? This sort of sounds like a disk error (I know Win7 doesn’t react well to failing sectors)

Peter

Oh, I just hope it doesn’t happen again but I think this was my own fault for renaming the folder.
I reamde the part and remade the circuit. I didn’t have time to try the solutions for my missing search bar yet but I will hopefully get a look at this tomorrow.
Thanks for the help guys.

Just reading what you guys are doing, it doesn’t seam to be an install problem but something that happens with parts.

Can you remember the exact specifics that this happened, and have the file, so I can have a crack at reproducing it. We need it constantly reproducible so the experts know where to look.

I have a spare PC that I can reload OSs anytime if they get destroyed.

EDIT
That’s weird, installing FZ on W10 was ridiculously easy.
There was no hanging, no api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll install, and everything had notification boxes to tell you what was happening. This was a fresh install of W10 with a few drivers and the std security it comes with.
What the hell do other people have that is killing FZ?

Same XP here; it was trivial for me. Obviously the hanging is down to git network performance and we have good broadband here. The runtime I am not sure, but possibly down to the specific version of 10 and / or what else is installed. Anniversary edition is known to be a lot more temperamental than the ‘gold’ edition.

I’m using:
Windows 10 Home
Version 10.0.14393 Build 14393

I had the problem with a circuit which I can’t share due to copyright issues with the book I got the circuit from.
Pity too because only 1/4 of the circuit is copyrighted.
I could send it privately to you OG for debugging if that helps…?
But I do still have the corrupted file/directory of the circuit.
The lost project is not important to me now as I recreated it from a save point yesterday and I’m about to start soldering it up now. :smiley:

I’m not smart enough to look at code, I mainly want to break FZ to see if it is reproducible, and see what circumstances make it happen.

I can try to simulate it on std part, because people did lose search without having that particular part. What exactly did you rename.

I started my Win10 and just renamed the folder where I had saved the sketch the previous night.
I then renamed the sketch which was still in the same (newly named) folder.
I had nothing else running at the time. This was the very first thing I done after boot up.
When I tried to open the newly named sketch, it gave me an error message which I did not record.although I believe it may have been this:
.fzz’: zip.open(): %d
I tried renaming the folder and sketch to no avail.
I wonder if my ridiculous folder-naming convention could have played a part…?
"
D:(D) - Projects(D) - Electronics(D) - PCB Projects(0) - Nordl3\Nordl3 - Dual LM Four Quadrant Multiplier
"
Good luck breaking it! :smiley:

The error message looks about right (fritzing has a bug where they forgot to add the errno variable so you get a %d instead of the error number) however assuming this should be read as (broken apart)

drive D
D:

directory
(D) - Projects(D) - Electronics(D) - PCB Projects(0) - Nordl3\

filename
Nordl3 - Dual LM Four Quadrant Multiplier

I don’t see anything wrong with it except the file name is missing the .fzz extension (which I expect is a typo or being supressed as a known prefix as Windows appears to recognize fzz files). However the error message may provide a clue, I’ll try a corrupted zip file and see what happens. Unfortunatly nothing. I renamed a random (non zip) file to your directory and file name in win10 and tried to open it in fritzing and while it came up with the zip open %d error message nothing else happened. Search still works fine and Fritzing didn’t hang.

(edit) if you still have the broken file could you try starting the Frtizing debug consle help->Enable debugging log and try loading your broken file again? I’m interested to see what the debug window has to say about this.

Peter