Labeling connections between sub-circuits

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I am probably using the wrong part, but I want to draw my circuit in sub-circuits like power latch, relays, etc. I want do this to simplify the routing.

I’ve found the inspector but I cannot label the pins.

Is there a similar part that I can use that will let me:

  • Change the number of pins as needed
  • Label each pin
  • Have one more line to say which sub-circuit it connects to

Changing pin labels in Inspector only works on parts from the parts factory (i.e. generic IC and the mystery part) not parts in general nor user created parts.

Not that I know of, but someone may have a workaround.

Peter

Ok, notes it is for now.
Thank you all the same.

When I find some time I will have to figure out how to contribute work to fritzing to help add a couple missing features.

That would be welcome, but is quite difficult. The code is complex and almost entirely undocumented (and there is no one left from the original development team to answer questions.)

Peter

That’s alright. I love banging my head against the wall. That is somewhat common to open-source projects.
I’ve been reverse engineering software since my C64 days and for this we actually have the source code, such as it is.
Sounds like the first goal should be a reorganization in a version fork.
Then extreme documentation.
Then further development will be much easier.

If I may ask, what’s your role? I see you on here helping a lot of people, just curious.

I’m just an interested user. I’m retired and Fritzing interests me. I tried to restart development for 3 or 4 years without success. The Ainsler folks who run the fab are partially funding a project manager who has restarted development and is trying to raise funds to hire professional developers. Because of that we are getting new releases (after a 5 or so year gap) and the future looks brighter.

Peter

Is this person a user here by chance?

Thanks for your time.

I guess you could say that I’m semi-retired. I poke my head up for good projects from time to time.

Yes his user id is @KjellM

Peter

You rock!
Thanks again.

The Fritzing-app repository on github has a bunch of open issues with help-wanted tags. That would be a good place to start.

Peter

I may start there, but I’m also weighing the time and frustration issue.
The question I’ve put to myself: Do I want to figure out a system that has some visible issues and an other-than-sheveled code base and continue to run into issues as a matter of course, or do I want to put in the time to fork it and reorganize from zero to eliminate headaches and provide better documentation for myself and future users.
The answer is that I’m not sure yet.

None of that is a judgement, btw, just observations.

Looks like there’s no DMs or I haven’t unlocked them yet or I’d say hi to @KjellM and start a dialog.

This used to come up when I was trying to restart development. My answer (then and now) is that the folks with commit access to the repository are willing to accept pull requests if someone makes one (and it is of good enough quality.) The web site and the forum (although forum usage has been steadily dropping in the 5 years I have been here) are where people come to get info about Fritzing. The problem is and was that there are almost no pull requests being made in the repository other than by Kjell. In my view a fork of the code isn’t going to help, as what has always been lacking is people with the expertise and willingness to put in the time to make improvements. In all the time I was trying to start development again, and said the above, there was no one new (I and a few other people have done a few, which were integrated in to 0.9.4) that submitted any pull requests. A number of folks that expressed interest, lost interest when they tried to get the development environment running (it is a lot o f work, and especially difficult on the Mac.) I documented how I got the Linux and Windows environments up but that didn’t seem to help a lot. I don’t see any likely hood that will change with a code fork (then or now!). There was when Kjell joined, a project underway to redo Fritzing in javascript. Kjell looked at that and decided the way forward is on the current C++ code base which is quite good quality and well designed, just complex to modify, using funded professional developers. It took about a year to deal with all the maintenance problems on the web site and in the forum, and recreate a new build environment (the old one was gone.) before the 0.9.4 release came out with a handful of bug fixes. There have been two more releases (0.9.6 and 0.9.7) since then, so I am still of the opinion the way forward is to contribute to the code base here.

There is one, it is just hard to find :slight_smile:

Click your user icon on the top right of the screen
click preferences (left most icon)
click summary then messages->new message

there may be a short cut I haven’t found somewhere too.

Peter