Instead of complaining about the relatively small core library, or the difficulty in adding custom parts, I’m going to do something better: for the next two thousand words, I’m going to demonstrate how to create a custom part in Fritzing. This summer, Adafruit created a whole bunch of Fritzing parts that still haven’t been added to the core libraries. Of course you can make custom parts in Fritzing.

Of Course You Can Make Custom Parts (It’s Just Tedious) Without the ability to create custom parts, Fritzing cannot legitimately call itself a PCB design tool and should not be used as such. The first PCB design tool released for the PC had this functionality. Fritzing is a tool just like MS Paint if MS Paint didn’t have the color blue.Ĭreating a custom part is necessary functionality of a PCB design tool. This is a false equivalency, though you can do anything you want in MS Paint, but you can’t do anything you want in Fritzing because you can’t add custom parts. Fritzing and MS Paint are easy-to-learn tools where you can produce acceptable results quickly. It’s easy to draw parallels between KiCad, Fritzing, MS Paint, Photoshop, and Aseprite. Photoshop lets you zoom in to see individual pixels and has transparency and layers, and Aseprite is a professional tool specifically designed for the creation and animation of pixel art. There are better tools to create pixel art, though.

It’s exactly what you need if you want to create pixel art quickly with a tool that’s easy to use. With MS Paint, you can edit individual pixels, select colors, and even do flood fills. If you’re like the majority of desktop or laptop users, the easiest tool to make pixel art is Microsoft Paint. For a PCB design tool, it’s a baffling decision, and I don’t know if I can call Fritzing a PCB design tool now. You cannot create a completely new part in Fritzing. That last part - making a new symbol and footprint - is a point of contention for Fritzing users. I recreate the schematic, recreate the board, and build a new symbol and footprint in each piece of software.

For each post in this series, I will take a reference schematic for a small, USB-enabled ATtiny85 development board. The introduction to this series of posts laid it out pretty bare.

Fritzing is a terrible tool that you should not use, but before I get to that, I need to back up and explain what this series of posts is all about. One of the more controversial of these tutorials was my post on Fritzing. Already, we’ve looked at Eagle CAD, KiCad, and took a walk down memory lane with one of the first PCB design tools for the IBM PC with Protel Autotrax. This is the continuation of a series of posts where I create a schematic and PCB in various EDA tools.

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