Deploying Fritzing

We need to deploy Fritzing to the entire school via SCCM.
Has anyone done this?
Are there any issues?

We all so use Applocker in GPO.

This would be a valuable tool for the students.

I’m not familiar with SCCM nor Applocker, but there is currently a problem with parts updating on Windows (and I’m guessing you are using Windows). That means the automatic parts updating isn’t currently working so to do a parts update you need to manually clone the parts repository from github in to the Fritizing installation directory. That should be to bad as long as you can update one central image and then distribute it to all your machine.

Peter

Thanks for tip. I updated the parts but I am now getting this.

you likely need to rebuild the parts database: select breadboard view (it is greyed out in the welcome window) then part->regenerate parts database. This will churn for a while and then shutdown. When you restart Fritzing the problems should clear. If they don’t the next thing to try is clearing the user folders (save a copy if you have sketches though):

kill corrupt files:

There are two user directories (with your parts and the parts database) which don’t get touched during an install (to not affect your sketchs during upgrades). On Windows they are in

c:\users\username\AppData\Fritzing\roaming\Fritzing (which is a hidden directory so you need to enable hidden directories in explorer) and

c:\Users\username\My Documents\Fritzing (where username is your windows id)

If you don’t have any parts or sketches you want to keep you can just delete those two directories and Fritzing will receate them, or you can move them aside by renaming them if you wan to keep something in them.

linux

~/Documents/Fritzing/parts
~/.config/Fritzing

Peter

1 Like

Thanks so much. A couple of things.

  1. You can not create a new account in the Fritzing Forum (captcha not working).
  2. Has anyone deployed Fritzing via GPO, SCCM or why haven’t they made it into the Microsoft Store.

This is such a valuable tool for the Education Sector and Microsoft Education would be more than happy to have this in the Education Store.

Yes I know. It has been reported to the maintainer and hopefully it will get fixed soon.

The unfortunate truth is that Fritzing is dying. It started as a funded research project which is how it got this far. When the grants ran out it went open source but the support hasn’t been there to keep it living and the developers have (presumably) moved on to other funded projects. There is a project to move it to javascript in its early stages but development on the current implementation of Fritzing has pretty much died (the javascript project is seen as the only way forward). I’m poking at bug fixing, but its a large, largely poorly documented project and even getting a development environment running has been difficult.

Peter