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:
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:
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?
, 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!