Xbee pro + mini usb adapter

Hello Fritzing community,

As many of you know, I have been doing some new fritzing parts or reworked a bit few ones, some of them for my electronic project because I love how this tool let me design beautiful breadboard / schematic / pcb views for each project so far.

Now I was checking into the existing xbee parts and noticed there weren’t shield board like USB adapter from DFRobot or the same version for Arduino which you can see here.

As you already guessed, I did my own part based on the image sticking to the size of most things but noticed an issue about the female header connector:

Breadboard view

The problem: Female holes have 0.08" spacing instead of the 0.1" Fritzing grid. You can verify these values at Pag. #6 of Xbee manual.

Due to that, I must do a new Xbee (in my case, Xbee pro) Fritzing part to match this spacing and therefore making the usb adapter (shield) usable for xbee projects.

Using the Eagle board file of the Xbee pro, turned it into svg (thanks to Eagle2Fritzing algorythm), I effectively confirmed the spacing for this piece (0.08") as you can see in the next picture:

Xbee pro svg

As you can see, white lines are 0.08" grid and almost all holes are aligned to this.

So the question right now is: Should I let it as it is to maintain the real aspect of Fritzing parts?

Are you saying the female headers are a 2mm pitch instead of the usual 0.100" pitch. You have to use the correct one for PCB view incase it gets plugged into a PCB. As for BB most of the boards are on the side of the BB and wired in, and that one looks too wide unless you jump 2 BBs. I say keep it real world for the children.

In general it is part makers choice. That said, I’ve found when mixing 2mm and .1 connectors in breadboard it can cause the other .1 connectors in bb to not align to the grid properly. I not exactly sure why, but experiments indicate grid alignment in breadboard isn’t simple. It doesn’t seem to be (as I initially thought) keyed to pin0. I tried a simple 4 pin part, then moved one pin at a time off the .1 grid. Moving any one pin doesn’t seem to misalign the rest but with mixed 2mm and .1 connectors alignment doesn’t work right either. So if you have both types you may want see what alignment looks like and pick what works best.

Peter

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Yeah, noticed that Fritzing align the parts based on the 2.54 mm (0.1 in) connectors instead of the little ones, no matter how much I tried moving it on Inkscape or changing the grid size on Fritzing.

Anyway, here are the final version of both parts:

xbee_usb_mini_adapter.fzpz (55.3 KB)
XBee_Pro_RF_module.fzpz (30.5 KB)

Actually for me none of them are on the grid :slight_smile: , I haven’t found a way to make it fit to the grid even moving the .1 connectors in Inkscape by what I think should be a correct offset to put them on the grid (I don’t really care about the 2mm ones because they won’t fit a.1 grid). It seems to move the pins in an non linear fashion so that doesn’t work. One thing I notice is both parts lack a breadboard layerId which means that they won’t export from Fritzing as an svg (you need to select all, group and name the group breadboard to fix this). In schematic on the xbee_usb_mini_adapter I prefer to set the pins to be the same as the breadboard, in this case pin 1 (connector 0) would be on the bottom right instead of the top left as now and the .1 connectors would be on the bottom and all 5 of them present so the schematic will match what breadboard really looks like, but as usual that is just me, and your part your choice! As usual good job on breadboard!

Peter

Peter

For some reason, I did it, now both the usb adapter and xbee pro can be stacked. The only issue is that it doesn’t auto attach the wires when stacked.

Thanks, fixed it.

I followed official schematic as you can check on Google for it.

xbee_pro_rf_module.fzpz (29.9 KB)
xbee_usb_mini_adapter.fzpz (56.5 KB)

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