Hi all, don’t mean to stir up trouble but I have a few questions.
I assume the Fritzing project gets some benefit from the Aisler integration, so if this topic is off limits please just say so.
Are there any other board houses that can take Frizing pick and place & BOM files along with the Gerbers and assemble complete boards?
SeeedStudio and JLCPCB both handle Fritzing Gerbers just fine. A BOM for SEED is relatively easy to generate by hand, or with a little python next time I’m feeling creative. The JLC pnp and BOM on the other hand are a pain.
Seeed/Aisler assembly pricing isn’t bad but it’s still prohibitive for small batches. (Yeah I know that can’t really be helped.)
So I’m wondering, are there currently any alternatives?
Yes AFAIK some portion of that revenue is returned to Fritzing to support ongoing development (along with the funds from the paywall.) Support from Aisler is also the reason that development restarted. That said, there is a post in the forums (without many details nor working code that I am aware of) by someone that got JLC (I think!) to work with Fritzing. The major pain was likely the pnp file and I think he hand modified the version to do what he needed. I expect a search of the forums may turn up that post although I don’t know what keywords would work (perhaps pick and place?)
edit this is likely the post I was thinking of (found by a search for pick and place):
I have shared @rc3105 the project that I did assemble at JLCPCB. There was no code involved, it was manual work inside LibreOffice to get the required Excel file. But basically the steps are:
Import the pnp file into a speadsheet
Add the right column names
Remove vias, labels and images
Negate the Y coördinates
Correct the rotation of some parts. This is trial and error until they appear correctly on the preview at JLCPCB.
Apparently the Gerber viewer at JLCPCB is kaput at the moment.
It’s not even properly displaying basic Gerber files so there’s no way to check and see if my examples work. I’ve tried from Firefox, Chrome, Safari on Mac and Edge & Chrome on W11.
Update: I am finding very wide range of assembly costs, but each requires a usable set of gerbers and files to make a quote. Due to rejected Fritzing files for quotes, I have resorted to using a downloaded Arduino Gerber set to gather (relative) competitive pricing, but the clear winners said no to Fritzing, and no offer to guide me or supply example files in how to alter them to be acceptable. I’m stuck. Help!
You would need to find out what format the board house needs (which may be difficult) then either manually of via a script change what Fritzing provides in to what they want. AFAIK there are no such tools currently so you would need to write your own. That would imply you understand what Fritzing currently provides and how to change it which may also be difficult (as Fritzing as rule is poorly documented.)
So it’s been a minute or three, but I wound up using the Seeed Studio pcb and assembly service. The board and parts pricing was competitive and the assembly was reasonable so we just ordered the whole thing from them. The project was an ultra-low current meter with a socket for an esp32 module to feed data back to an sql database via wifi. I think our total cost per unit, with the esp32 module and super sensitive op-amps being the majority of that, was like $4 or something.
Well under $5 anyway, and SO much cheaper than the $175 meters we’d been using so we were able to dedicate one to each test point rather than move meters around throughout the evaluation process.
Again, it’s been a while so I don’t remember exact specifics, but I converted the Fritzing output for the Seeed requirements on a simple project by hand in an hour or two as I was reading the Seeed specs for the first time, then wrote some python scripts to automate that and it wasn’t difficult.
I wish Fritzing were more practical, but with development stalled and the installers behind a paywall we’ve started putting interns onto KiCad :-\
