Introduction
“Fritzing is an open-source hardware initiative that makes electronics accessible as a creative material for anyone. We offer a software tool, a community website and services in the spirit of Processing and Arduino, fostering a creative ecosystem that allows users to document their prototypes, share them with others, teach electronics in a classroom, and layout and manufacture professional pcbs.”
This tutorial is just a quick startup guide for Fritzing, if you want to learn a bit more the youtube Fritzing Tutorial - A Beginners Guide to Making Circuit & Wiring Diagrams by Troy Baverstock is a good place.
Get the Fritzing app
Go to the Fritzing download page and either pay the voluntary amount or skip it. The Mac OSX binary is downloaded as a disk image (.dmg) file. Open it by double clicking and drag (copy) the Fritzing app to your Applications folder.
If Fritzing requires security clearance for being “unverified” you have to go via the Mac OSX menu:
and then to Security & Privacy and allow Fritzing to launch.
The first time you (successfully) launch Fritzing it will create a Fritzing folder in your home directory. The folder contains two sub-folders: bins and parts where your diagrams and custom components etc will be stored once you start using Fritzing.
Your first project
Start Fritzing. You should get the welcome screen shown below.
Organize the breadboard
Click the menu button (illustrated in the figure below), and you should see a full size breadboard. The breadboard attributes are shown in the Inspector window (full inspector window for the breadboard shown to the right) at the bottom of the right column in the GUI. In the Inspector you can change the breadboard size as indicated in the figure below. For this tutorial I changed to half+ and then rotated the breadboard 90 degrees (under the rotation option just above the size option). To move the breadboard, hold down the space bar/key, grab the breadboard with the mouse and move it.
Add arduino board
In the upper Parts window of the right column, click the button (shown to the right), and select the microprocessor that goes with your project. For my project I selected an Arduino Nano board. Note how the Inspector changed to reflect that the Arduino Nano board is now the selected item in the Breadboard window.
Add a wire
When you hover over connection point on either the breadboard or the Arduino board, the app will change color for the connection point and a small info-box pops up (as for the GND connection on the Arduino Nano board to the right). To attach a wire to the connection, click and hold the left mouse button, then drag the mouse to the target connector and release the left mouse button to attach the wire. As illustrated below.
Use the mouse to add bendpoints and move the wire - left click anywhere along the wire, hold the button and drag into place, then release to let go of the wire. To change the color, either hover over the wire and click the ctrl-key, then color in the pop-up window, or select the wire and use the Inspector entry for color. To force 90-degree bends (or horisontal and vertical wires), hold down the shift-key while moving the bendpoint and it will only take on discrete positions.
Add led and resistor
The Fritzing app comes preloaded with all kinds of standard components. They are all available under different tabs in the Parts window. In the example below I have completed a very simple project adding just a LED, a resistor and a power wire for the LED. The code (sketch) for turning the led on and off are in the post on Arduino Nano project preparation.
In the Parts window you can also search for any module or component (board, breakout board, module, component etc) that you want to add. Modules that are not preloaded in the Fritzing app can often be found in online libraries. The best place to look is probably arduinomodules. If you find the module you are looking for just download the parts module, a file with the extension .fzpz, but usually stored as a zip file. I store my downloaded modules in a special folder under the Frtizing folder in my home directory. Import the downloaded module to Fritzing, as shown to the left.
