Mac M1 Apple Silicon

[robobob68]

Hey all - I’m excited to be taking delivery of my new M1 Macbook Air in a few days and I’ve make a list of critical apps … and Fritzing is one, of course!

Has anyone built Fritzing yet on the new ARM silicon? I’m game to help out. I understand it’s based on Qt and that’s a potential blocker and I posted on Reddit - got some answers from a Qt engineer about 5.15.2 and 6.x both being able to be compiled. I don’t know the particulars of Fritzing’s needs quite yet and would love to hear from folks who are in the know.

Thanks!
roboBob

[vanepp]

A couple of years ago someone wanted to run Fritzing on a Raspberry PI. At that point there was a port to the PI (which is an Arm CPU) available, so it should be possible to do this. The person at that time decided to use Windows instead of the PI version so I don’t know that the arm version actually worked, but it was in a RPI repo so I expect it may have. That said there are build instructions for Windows and Linux in this post here in developers which should give you the basic idea of what is needed:

Build instructions for Linux and Windows

As a start to getting people being able to test fixes and improvements to Fritzing here are current build instructions for Linux (in this link to a post in wishlist which I made before finishing the Windows version) and Windows. Even if you don’t want to do development you may want to build the current version of Fritzing to get (and therefore test widely) fixes that have been generated since 0.9.3b was released. I don’t think there is enough new yet to make a new release any time soon (and even…

there are also instructions on the blog. Good luck!

Peter

[robobob68]

Super awesome. Yeah knowing that it worked on ARM in the past is helpful. I hope to get Qt nailed down first for a few different apps that rely upon it and then get Fritzing done. Are there good resources for questions / solutions to problems along the way (like yourself?) ? I guess I’m asking if the forum is pretty active and supportive.

Also, if I do wind up with a success at the end here, how would you like it “published” back to the group? And how to make it available to other M1 owners? I notice that Fritzing only gets limited updates over time so waiting for an official release might be counter-productive for new owners of a computer that could benefit from M1 direct support.
Thanks!
roboBob

[vanepp]

@robobob68

Are there good resources for questions / solutions to problems along the way (like yourself?) ? I guess I’m asking if the forum is pretty active and supportive.

The forum is probably your best bet, as the developers read the forum at least occasionally and may chip in. You can also open an issue on the Fritzing-app part of github, the developers monitor that more closely.

@robobob68

Also, if I do wind up with a success at the end here, how would you like it “published” back to the group?

The best bet will be to convince Kjell to integrate it in to the build tool chain, but that will depend on how easy that is to do I expect. Is there a supported version of QT for the arm already or do you have to build QT from source?

@robobob68

I notice that Fritzing only gets limited updates over time so waiting for an official release might be counter-productive for new owners of a computer that could benefit from M1 direct support.

Kjell is trying to speed up the delay between upgrades so that may not be that big an issue if the modification to the tool chain isn’t too bad. Developer time is still quite limited at present.

Peter

[robobob68]

Thanks for the insights. I’ll take all this into account as I gain a head of steam on it in the next few weeks. I think the new machine will arrive this coming week and I’ve got to prioritize work functionality first, of course.

@vanepp

Is there a supported version of QT for the arm already or do you have to build QT from source?

The Qt build will at least initially be from source. There is no supported official download quite yet. I haven’t done my reading yet on building Fritzing - can you tell me off the top of your head what version of Qt it relies upon?

And I’ll keep Kjell in mind as well as Github, of course.
roboBob

[vanepp]

@robobob68

can you tell me off the top of your head what version of Qt it relies upon?

The current release is using 11.2 I believe, they have in the past upgraded to the latest stable version when doing new releases so version shouldn’t be that much of an issue I don’t think.

Peter

[robobob68]

Awesome. @vanepp - you rock. I’m shocked my how much info I’ve gotten in such a short time!