Fritzing

Fritzing is an open-source initiative to develop software to design electronic hardware. This software is designed in the same spirit as the Arduino where it abstracts away the complexity of diagramming the circuit, so the user can focus on the design itself. There will be a Fritzing sketch in the downloadable code, for all projects in this book. A Fritzing sketch is a project within the Fritzing application that represents the circuit being created. These projects can contain both circuit diagrams and code if the project includes a microcontroller like the Arduino. We will not be using the coding section of Fritzing in this book and instead will use the standard Arduino IDE, but it is good to know it is there.

The Fritzing sketches included in the downloadable code will allow you to examine the design of each project closer and enables you to adjust the design if you want to. We will also be including either a Fritzing diagram or a schematic diagram in the book itself for each project to show how to create the circuit. Both types of diagrams will be generated from the Fritzing sketch.

Fritzing is a very powerful tool and it is recommended that you spend some time learning how to create your own diagrams with it. This chapter is focused on how to read both the Fritzing and schematic diagrams that are included in this book. If you wish to learn how to use the Fritzing software, their website has a very good tutorial that you can find here: http://fritzing.org/learning/. Let's start with the Fritzing diagrams.