Thanks to everyone for sending in your inspiring/cute/impressive projects via mail, Twitter, and our project gallery! It was tough for us to make a decision, let alone come up with a good set of criteria. …ta-dahhhh, and the winners are:

1. The Super Upgrade Kit goes to hdf_mjf_de for his simple, yet fun and beautifully and completely documented Beep Game! Of course the built-in Fritzing hommage had us biased.

1. The free Fab production goes to J_Hodgie for his impressive Mega Motor Shield, because of its mega-ness and for squeezing the latest bleeding edge features out of Fritzing.

1. The Edgy Motor Breakout goes to RainerWierland for his Tilduino, a handy, compact Arduino clone he built for his son, again thoroughly documented.

We also can’t resist to give a special price to another delightful project, for the simplest project with the greatest impression: Mario Böhmer’s Show Love in a Heartbeat receives a free Fritzing Fab production to turn his project into a real product.

Congratulationsto everyone, and we hope we picked the right present for you all!

This post concludes the year for us and we hope you all had a wonderful one. It certainly has been an exciting time for Fritzing, with big new features, supportive partnerships, fantastic workshops, and most of all a rewarding community. Thank you all!

Hi everyone,

just in time for the season we deliver a new release to play with over the holidays. Even though it’s a minor release it comes with a lot of nifty new features:

• The new parts bin navigation lets you easily browse through your part bins and has dedicated bins for some popular manufacturers.
• Fritzing got much faster - especially on the Mac! We owe this speed improvement to the wonderful folks at Qt, who released the new version 4.8.
• Parts can now be rotated freely in breadboard and pcb view. Just hover a selected part over a corner, then drag around.
• Our generic ICs now provide a dedicated pin label editor to make it easier to create custom ICs. You can find it in the inspector window.
• On your PCB, you now can decide if you like to have a ground fill (empty spaces are filled with copper connected to the GND) or just a copper fill (not connected).
• In preparation for the new Super Upgrade Kit you can find new example circuits for 7 segment displays, shift registers, rotary encoders and much more.
• Lots of new parts from parkFun (thanks Lionel, Nathan, Ryan, Robert), Snootlab (thanks Lionel and Lionel), from the Fritzing team (shrouded pin headers, ECB transistors, 3mm LEDs, Superflux LEDs, 5 band resistors, the Atmega 2560, SSOP 28 footprint, rotary encoder). We also finally managed to include some of the wonderful community contributed parts (fuse, low dropout voltage regulator, Atmega644, HCF 4067, RTC breakout, HEF 4094, RGB 3W Star, DB-25 connector). Thanks to Johan, Macgyveremir, Forvellos, Mike, SorkiG, Niclas, Kungfumachinist.
• An updated Portugues translation -thanks Nuno!

Give it a spin!

Your little Fritzing elves

Hi everyone,

It’s that time of the year again, and we would like to take the opportunity to re-cap what the last year has brought. So here’s the Fritzmas challenge 2011: You show us what you did, and we give you what we did.

How you can win

Take a look at what you’ve built with Fritzing this year, and snap a couple of photos/screenshots. If you think it’s an interesting concept, a technical masterpiece, or just fun, we want to see it all. Then either upload it to our projects gallery or mail them to info (ät) fritzing.org. (Also, you must agree that we may publish what you send us (if you prefer, anonymized).

Deadline is Sunday, December 18th.

The prizes

From all submissions, we will pick three winners. These will be awarded with the latest Fritzing developments:

The 1st prize is one of the all-new Fritzing Super-Upgrade Kits, to be launched later this year.

The 2nd prize is a free Fritzing Fab PCB production for your project (one copy of your board), through our Fritzing Fab service that we launched in July.

The 3rd prize is the all-new Fritzing Edgy Motor, the first in a series of Fritzing breakout boards with a new, breadboard-friendly approach.

We’re very much looking forward to your submissions!

Your Fritzing team

Last weekend we had the pleasure to be invited to the Create. Art and Technology festival in Berlin.

André held a talk about »Frizting – creative electronics for the rest of us« and we gave two intense Fritzing workshops in which people could learn the use of Arduino and Fritzing.

The conference was initiated and organised by our ever-enthusiastic friends Anton Mezhiborskiy from TINKER SOUP and Stefan Canditt from FORMULOR. Great job, guys! Talks on prototyping, wearables, materials, playing, and sensing gave the right inputs and visitors could join workshops such as lasercutting with vvvv, soft circuits,  playing with CUBELETS or – of course – Fritzing.

It was great to meet so many interesting and interested people and we enjoyed this time a lot. Our special treat was to meet several people from the Fritzing forums - it’s so much nicer to meet in person! Some of them even showed off their beautiful Fritzing Fab creations. We are all looking forward to Create. Art and Technology 2012 (hint, hint)!

We arrived on a sunny morning at the train station in Elmshorn (a beautiful village in the north of Hamburg). Martin Hieronymus, who teaches there and invited us, picked us up and took us to the Nordakademie. Sixteen business computer science students already waited to get in touch with electronics and Fritzing. André started by introducing Fritzing and what it is all about. He explained the concept of physical computing and tangible user interfaces, and moved on to the basics of electronics.

Many students had already worked with electronics theoretically and practically before, but most frustrated by the complexity of a basic setup. So as usual it was great to see the excitement of the students when they got their first little led to blink in no time.

Fritzing in the teaching context was doing a wonderful job, and this way everybody learns Fritzing by learning Arduino and electronics.

On the second day, the students developed their own project ideas, for example media-controllers, musical instruments, a binary clock and even an LED Pong.

They successfully transferred their projects to the Fritzing breadboard view and also made the schematics. The last step for this day was to make a PCB layout out of it and get to know the production export and Fritzing Fab process. The feedback of the students concerning the software was amazing. They liked Fritzing a lot and had some very useful ideas to improve the workflow.

Concluding, I have to say it was a trip I don’t want to miss. Martin treated us very hospitably and we are looking forward to return to the Nordakademie.

You can find some more impressions on our Flickr-Stream.