I see amateur boards built in every tool, and without exception, the worst are always designed in Fritzing. EE professors, TAs, or Chris Gammell might beat me on volume, but they’re only looking at boards made by students using one tool. You may scoff at this, but think about it: simply due to my vocation, I look at a lot of PCBs made by amateurs. I am, perhaps, the world’s leading expert at assessing poorly designed and just plain shitty PCBs. Just because a piece of software is important doesn’t mean it’s good. It was the inspiration for CircuitLab, and the Fritzing influence can easily be seen in Autodesk’s 123D Circuits.

The story of the ‘maker movement’ – however ill-defined that phrase is – cannot be told without mentioning Fritzing. Despite what the Fritzing’s Wikipedia talk page claims, Fritzing is an important piece of software. Simply by virtue of being an editor for Hackaday, I have seen thousands of homebrew PCBs, and tens of thousands of amateur and hobbyist electronics projects.

I feel it is necessary to contextualize Fritzing in the space of ‘maker movement’, DIY electronics, and the last decade of Hackaday. It is frequently compared to Processing, Wiring, or Arduino in that it provides an easy way for artists, creatives, or ‘makers’ to dip their toes into the waters of PCB design. We’re done with Eagle, and now it’s time to move onto Fritzing.įritzing came out of the Interaction Design Lab at the University of Applied Sciences of Potsdam in 2007 as a project initiated by Professor Reto Wettach, André Knörig and Zach Eveland. This week, we’re continuing our Creating A PCB In Everything series, where we go through the steps to create a simple, barebones PCB in different EDA suites.

Fritzing breadboard power supply