Hello friends of Fritzing in Seoul! Guess who’s in town?

It’s Fritzing co-founder and godfather Reto :) He is visiting Seoul from today till Friday 6th of December and  he will be more that happy to meet you and chat with you about Fritzing, what projects you use it for, how you use it, your feedback, suggestions to improve our products and services offering, and if you are nice (which you definitely are) he might even offer you a goodie.

For those who don’t know Reto, he is someone who’s incredibly passionate and smart about everything he does (especially Fritzing), but here is a short summary of what he does: Reto is the founder and design director of IxDS, responsible for the overall design strategy. He is a Professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, where he teaches “Physical Interaction Design” and researches innovative, bodily-focused approaches to Human-computer interaction. Reto has previously worked as an Associate Professor with the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, and as a designer/researcher with Sony in Tokyo and Ideo in San Francisco. He studied Industrial Design at UdK Berlin and Mechanical Engineering at TU Berlin. Prior to his studies, Reto had an apprenticeship as a stonemason in Southern Germany.

Drop us a comment and we’ll get you in touch with him ;)

We have some exciting news for our beloved fab service users!

1. Finally you get a black silkscreen on both sides of your boards for no extra cost! PCBs with submitted  top and bottom silkscreen layers will be fabbed with both layers, as simple as that! By the way since release 0.8.0  you can flip your board in PCB view and work on the bottom layer copper and silkscreen as if you had the board in your hand.
2. We dropped the tracked post shipping in Europe and rest of the world because it was too slow and the tracking was inefficient. Instead, you will be able to choose between UPS Standard, which is much faster, insured and trackable in real time, and UPS Express for your shipments in Europe. Customers outside of Europe will be able to choose the very affordable but untracked and slow traditional postal shipping or the 48h Express shipping service. Check out our pricing page for the new fees.
3. We added a "Billing Address" field to your order page for the people who need to have their orders shipped to a different address than the billing address.

Happy fabbing!

UPS Airlines

We waited for this MakerFaire impatiently and finally it is happening!

More than 250 projects are being presented this weekend by makers and inventors from all over the world, and as usual we met many old friends and users and made new friends.

It was great to see how many people came to visit the Faire, families, adults, teenagers, children, educators, hobbyists etc…

The venue was full from the opening hour till the call till sunset. This really shows that the maker movement is a solid and genuine thing. People don’t get excited then go home and forget about it, the projects and products exhibited stimulate the creative and curious part inside us in an irresistible way. Some lives are even shaped by this spark of inspiration  forever.

Dale had this observation and tweeted it yesterday, we can only agree to it: There is no place in the world that can claim to be THE hub of the movement. This really belongs to us, tinkerers and explorers, any Makerfaire in the world will be full of old and young people with eyes wide open.

It also was with great pleasure that we discovered PCBs  made with our fab service at the BASTL-INSTRUMENTS stand. The guys use Fritzing to layout the boards and our fab service to prototype their products.

They now sell their MIDI-synthesizers as a kit or assembled, and we are sure they will have a huge success because everyone at their booth was having a blast making music.

Our friend and reseller Yuan from EXP-Tech dropped by for a very nice conversation about the german and the chinese maker scenes, and we exchanged a lot of our experiences about managing the bits part of a hardware business.

It was another great event, we had a lot of fun and we are going home with many great new projects and a lot of feedback, but mainly with so much more excitement and enthusiasm for keeping on doing what we do for the community, and start better products and services to empower inventors and makers everywhere.

BONUS: this is a “behind the scenes” photo of  us setting up the stand and building the Creator Kit examples. The handsome guy on the right is Tommaso our colleague at IXDS and one of the creators of Dandylight. We do look seriously busy :D

Our friends from the REMAKE Festival in Belgrade are organising it this year in Berlin and we are offering a workshop as part of the program for people who want to get started with electronics: Introduction to Interactive Electronics.

This workshop, aimed at beginners, shows the basics of ‘Physical Computing‘ with the Arduino microcontroller in the Fritzing framework. No prior knowledge is required, but it usually helps to know a little programming. If interested, please send your mini bio and motivational letter to: vedrana.boskovic@ gmail.com

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 5-15 COST PER PERSON: just daily or four-day Festival Ticket

MATERIAL NEEDED:

1. Laptop: ideally with the latest version of Arduino and Fritzing pre-installed. If you don‘t have one, don‘t worry, you can probably share with your workshop neighbor.

2. Fritzing Creator Kit which you can buy at the workshop for a discounted price of 89€.

3. Good mood and crea- tive ideas. Fritzing is an open-source initiative supporting designers, artists, researchers and hob- byists, aiming to take the step from physical prototyping to actual product.

Fritzing participated this year at the Open Hardware Summit for the first time! It was such a great event! We had the feeling everyone we knew, or once talked to or even heard of was there!

It was also so cool that the MIT hosted the event this year, the organisation was perfect and the venue very nice. The talks were very inspiring, but most of the exciting stuff and the interesting conversations happened in the corridor outside where the demos and posters were shown.

It’s so impressive to see how well people from the “scene” know each others, and how everyone shares very specific details on their designs and businesses so openly. In other industries this would be a well protected “trade secret” but not in here!

It was also very refreshing to have so many makers who want to go professional come to us and benefit from our experience in going from shipping 20 kits a month to more than a thousand. We showed on our poster the key elements of an ERP system and how to implement one. What to take care of and how to do it right.

We also had so many long time fritzing users pass by and give us some feedback.

We are still on the go in the US, expect a few follow-up posts in the next few days.

We had the chance and pleasure of participating in the first MakerFaire in Germany last weekend in Hannover. It was a great chance to meet many of our users who don’t live in Berlin, also many old friends, and we also made some new friends.

We were also very excited to introduce and sell the first Fritzing Creator Kits at the MakerFaire and notice how people positively welcomed, even though there were many other kits for sale.

Below are some photos and impressions of the weekend:

Daniel and me behind the stand in our brand new kickass Fritzing t-shirts (notice the new logo).

Another angle including our homemade monster LED Matrix. - boy do we look proud :D -

Here is the first ever proud owner of the Creator kit. -he got a very special loving autograph- This one sale is very special to me: the older sister promised me that she would show her little brother how to “play” with Roboter and Dinosaurier. She’s a little ladyada!

It was really sweet to see this teenager explain to her father what Arduino is and what’s possible to do with it.

Father and son also bought this kit for the rainy weekends.

And this couple too. They said they were both curious about electronics and that they will explore this field together following the book.Jonathan, our senior developer was very glad to meet Fritzing users and eager to explain to them the individual projects you can build with the creator kit.

It was a great event, we will do it again every possible time!

PS: if you were there and you took nice photos of us, please send them to our email address or post them on the forum, and thank you we love you too.

The Open Knowledge Foundation is organising the EnergyHack Berlin hackathon this weekend as a contribution to the “energy revolution” everyone is talking about in Germany, and we are also sponsoring this event.

All hardware hacks that will be documented using Fritzing and shared online will get free PCBs from our Fab Service.

This will be a very exciting opportunity to use public big data and combine it with small data collected with IoT devices. If you are a tinkerer, a developer, a designer or just interested, just join us and spread the word!

Expertenworkshop für den Hackday “EnergyHack” from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo.

Codemotion is not just another tech conference where developers and engineers attend to compare tools and argue about what’s best and what’s cool. It is a meeting point for many disciplines, hardware meets software and design in a unique and powerful combination.

We were invited to present Fritzing in the “Makers” category and we gladly accepted to do so. Fritzing was created in the first place to close the gap between creatives and electronics, to take away the fear of electrons and to transform physical computing mystery into creative material just like any text, graph or animation. We believe that Codemotion is one of the best meeting points for all people who use Fritzing, or should be using it.

Come and join us on Saturday, May 11th at the HTW in Berlin, the talk is at 16:10. You can see the page by clicking on the image below.

We are looking forward to meet you there and put a face on your projects and PCBs.

Our friend Wolf who is doing a talk about FabLabs will sell our Starter Kits at his stand friday and saturday, and our friend Stefania will do a talk about teaching kids technology.

The Fritzing team is searching for a smart, organized and reliable business/accounting/administration student to help with back-office and bookkeeping activities for one day per week.

Qualifications:

• Business / accounting or administration degree ongoing or completed.
• Solid knowledge of bookkeeping and controlling
• Experience in a similar position (6months +)

Job tasks:

• Entering incoming invoices in ERP and bookkeeping system
• Compiling monthly financial statements
• Controlling outgoing invoices.

Compensation:

• 10 EUR / Hour

Starting date:

• Immediately

Contact person:

We’re very excited to announce that the Edgy Motor Control is now in store and ready to ship. We’ve been working on this first Edgy for quite some time now (actually Stefan was), and we believe it will further simplify the prototyping phase of projects that require controlling DC motors or a stepper motor.

This breakout board was designed to perfectly fit on a breadboard and reduce cabling to a strict minimum. Adding motors to your project can be considered as an additional block module and no longer an engineering nightmare. We also took care of posting example projects and the necessary code to be used with Arduino to control a stepper motor or two DC motors on our projects page.

The Edgy Motor Control comes assembled and ready to be used out of the box, you can read more details about it on the product page on our shop and place your orders immediately.