Hackaday Fritzing Beat Down

If you haven’t read this yet it is pretty brutal for Fritzing. http://hackaday.com/2016/10/11/creating-a-pcb-in-everything-friends-dont-let-friends-use-fritzing/

He must have spent 1 hour on FZ, because the guy obviously doesn’t know what he is doing. Just because you have experience in one piece of software doesn’t mean you can just jump onto another and be an expert.

Of course parts are hard to make, just look at them. These are not simple stick drawing like other programs, it needs a full drawing for BB view, which is a view no one else has.

Of course you drop your Arduino off the side of the board, because that is what you have to do in real life.

You can connect labels to pins

Just right-click on a part and rotate it, big deal.

“No one needs to know how to connect parts” That’s the biggest wrong you will ever read.
No one uses auto router, not even Dave from EEVblog who was a high end circuit designer for 30 years, and he always tells you that.

Basically with Fritzing you pay for the prettiness with part creation, but once you know how to do it becomes less of a problem.
If you are a high end user you probably shouldn’t be using it, but if it’s a hobby the extra time to make something isn’t a problem, like this

https://www.mediafire.com/convkey/c238/993h317py667zhl6g.jpg

The author (Brian Benchoff) left this comment below the article:

Reward: $100 to the first person to make and document a DIP ‘tiny85 part from scratch in the current version of fritzing, as complete as the most anal hackaday commenter would expect, posted to hackaday.io. I’m serious.

I think someone one here could claim this? But he does have some good points though. I do wish Fritzing devs were more active but hey thats life. If they incorporated some of the more pro EDA’s tools for PCB and Schematic design would go a long way.

He who knows the least has the strongest opinion…

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I think his $100 is pretty safe :slight_smile: note the terms "to make and document a DIP ‘tiny85 part from scratch " I take that to mean not starting from another Fritzing part. It is still doable by someone with enough experience but then you run in to “the as complete as the most anal hackaday commenter would expect, posted to hackaday.io”. Enough words in there to weasel out I expect … He does indeed have some valid points, but in my view the appropriate thing to do about them is to provide resources to the Fritzing project to correct the flaws either m the form of donations to fund development or time and patches to the source code (which unlike Eagle is available to do that with). Eagle is all very nice while it survives (which I think may not be so very long, as it was bought by Autodesk recently I believe, Autocad here you come eagle users …). He is entirely correct about the state of part create documentation though I’d have to admit.

Peter Van Epp

It is not difficult to make a FZ part form scratch… It is though quicker to use other FZ files as templates. i.e. To make a 30-pin part, I will start of with a 30-pin connector, the .fzp and .svg’s are already labeled… All EDAs have their pros and cons… I like things about all of them and there are things about all of them that I don’t care much for… If I could take the things out of each one of them and put into one EDA, I would have the ideal platform… for me anyway… Of course, we all have different likes and dislikes. The best thing I like about creating parts with a graphics editor is flexibility… I can create a part anyway I like without the restrictions of an EDA built in parts creation tool… In FZ I can create very complex board shapes, I am not aware of another EDA where that can be accomplished. Some EDAs, anything other than a rectangle can be quite challenging.

I never could figure out why people want to compare, Fritzing vs. other EDAs. FZ is not commercial software, it’s in a league of it own…

Just think, in nearly all other EDAs to create the DIP 'tiny85 part, you would need to start for scratch, In Fritzing you don’t need to… Just take another similar part, do a little editing and you have an instant DIP 'tiny85… just think how much time that saves by not starting for scratch… :grinning:

Yeah, it’s a total moot-point because no one makes a part from scratch because it too slow.

Why don’t those guys put a breadboard view in their EDA, hell KiCad can’t even link views in real time, and then we will see how they go. It certainly won’t be as pretty.

It’s basically the visual element that gets beginners going so quickly.

If I had time I would take him up on this, not for the money but just to show it is not impossible or even that difficult (Maybe over the holidays). Though I think Fritzing is in a slump now and has been for quite awhile. The lack of people willing to delve into the source code and actually fix, upgrade and improve it makes it a great whipping post for people. One thing I cannot understand is putting that stupid code editor tab in? Why? It’s just another not so useful thing they have to maintain. Keep it simple and make it powerful? Arduino already has that covered?

FZ isn’t in a slump because when I joined 1 year 1 month ago there was maybe 3 people on the forum a week, now it’s 5 a day.

No one is getting paid making FZ, so it will come at a slow pace. GIMP took nearly a decade to get good from when I first used it in the 90s.

I was thinking that it might be a bit overly complicated, but when you think about it it’s the complicated bit that makes it easy to actually use when you know the tricks.

If you ask me Inkscape is way harder to master than FZ, because with FZ you just have to make parts follow some rules.

I bet if someone did a full featured tutorial on FZ, and especially part making, with what everything does, it would certainly boost FZ.

nuff said!

All software is going to need less work as it gets to the end, so I suppose that’s normal.

On the other hand I bet parts creation has gone the other way.

Unfortunatly not. There hasn’t been a commit to the parts repository since July and another user commented he has had a pull request for a new part in for 6 months with no action yet so it looks like things have stopped at least for a while. Hopefully it will pick up …

Peter Van Epp