Fritzing 0.9.8 released

We have released Fritzing 0.9.8 on Monday, 9th of August 2021. We tested it for Windows 10, Windows 11 (preview), macOS BigSur, macOS High Sierra, Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, Fedora 34.

Fritzing 0.9.8

Improvements

Since the 0.9.6 release, we were able to close ~250 issues in our fritzing-app repo.

  • Fixes a regression with generic ICs in Fritzing 0.9.7 #3859
  • Bump up Qt version for Linux builds, we now use 5.15.2 for all platforms
  • Build an AppImage We created an AppImage based on Ubuntu 18.04. Fritzing is now able to run on any system with glibc 2.27 or later.
  • Read single FZP files For parts developers, we added the ability to open an FZP file directly. Fritzing can then bundle the file into an FZPZ. This can ease the workflow for developers who use external editors to create parts.
  • Selection dropdowns are transparent #3848
  • stroke-width not inherited when exporting to Gerber #3843
  • Incorrectly configured fzp file crashes parts editor #3839
  • Invalid .FZP file causes a segfault #3838
  • Error when updating parts #3836
  • Platform, Board and Port menus are a barely readable white on grey on macOS #3833
  • Silkscreen path not appearing in Gerber output #3809
  • Arduino Nano Export SVG Missing #3782
  • GUI is blocked for up to 2 minutes until the check is complete #3677
  • Duplicating a net label in schematic view causes phantom ratsnest connections to appear. It cannot be deleted either. #3340
  • Net label copy bug? #2308
  • Interesting stuff happens when you paste formatted stuff into notes #711

New parts

  • Sony’s Spresense Boards and Camera

Updated translations

The following translations have received some care - German - French - Italian - Japanese - Portuguese - Russian - Spanish - Ukrainian

Thanks

Big thanks to everyone who helped to make this release possible. Namely Bruno Santos Ramalhete, Daniel Gun, Josh Morgenstern, Peter Van Epp, A. Faina !

The release is available in our downloads section.

New Fritzing release 0.9.6

Hello everyone! Today you get your hands on version 0.9.6. We have tested it on macOS Catalina and Big Sur, Windows 10 64 bit, and Ubuntu 20.04!

Fritzing 0.9.6

Installers

Both Microsoft and Apple have raised the bar on how to execute some code on your computer. They check the developer’s ID and warn or simply reject any program with mysterious origins. This was no issue in the past, but as regulations became stricter, more and more users had to jump quite high to get Fritzing running. We got all the certificates required and packaged and signed Fritzing 0.9.6 for a smooth setup.

Fixes

This is a maintenance release. We have fixed at least ten crashes, several critical bugs, and about 30-100 regular bugs, depending on how you count. Approximately 300 issues have been closed since the last release 0.9.4.

Some of the fixes are:

  • Ground fill is connected only to the lower side #2186
  • The routing status algorithm needs to handle the part to part connections (LED in an Arduino for example). Fixes #2685
  • Export to PNG does not update until restart#3073
  • Fill image with the background before exporting, fixes #3261
  • crash when both, bus and subpart in the same part #3329
  • Override system color for notes. Fixes #3530
  • Gerber rendering moves and skips nodes in board outline #3537
  • Crash when editing connector highlight colors #3566
  • No ‘routing complete’ message when no wires used to connect parts #3579
  • Override system color for parts bin list #3600
  • Two parts connected via breadboard don’t route #3616
  • font-size px is the same as user coordinates and can be ignored #3619
  • design rules check not seeing all of the copper for specific part #3647
  • If the property is empty, take the default one. Fixes #3648
  • White note text #3657
  • Dashed line is gone in breadboard view after moving element #3683
  • Gerber export missing and moving some custom PCB cutouts #3686
  • A typo in german translation #3694
  • Finish pending move operation before deleting an item. Fixes issue #3697
  • Ignore breadboard and schema wires when setting PCB layer count #3699
  • Deselect all items before exporting an image to PNG or JPG. Fixes #3712
  • Export PNG without selection rectangles #3712
  • 2.2mF capacitor #3713
  • Fritzing 0.9.4 crashes on macOS Catalina 10.15.7 #3747
  • Export as image, toggled layers not honored #3771
  • Fix the number of allowed digits within the resistor regex
  • Fix bug that prevented trace width for autorouter to be remembered
  • Fix SVG path element parse and matching of extra graphics to PCB connector pad
  • Fix broken duplicated network calls
  • Fix nullptr dereference
  • Workaround: show a white icon instead of nullptr crash
  • Fix crash when SVG file was not found

Features

It is now possible to store multiple parts in one fzpz (Fritzing part package). This will make it more convenient to handle and share a group of parts. Older versions of Fritzing should show an error message and only load the first part in the file. So it will take a while until this feature becomes fully usable.

New parts

The majority of new parts have been created in the forum and can be found there. However, besides fixing issues with some parts, we also integrated a few to the core library.

  • Raspberry PI 4B
  • Kameleon STM32F board
  • Voltage regulators
  • Heltec Wifi Lora 32 V2
  • HiFive1
  • More predefined capacitors

Updated software stacks

We updated to a newer version of C++ and Qt5 libraries. On Mac, we use the 5.15.2 release of Qt; on Windows 5.12.10; on Ubuntu, we use the one that comes with Ubuntu 20.04. Increasing the C++ version to C++14 enabled some cleanups in the codebase, which will benefit Fritzing in the long term. This sounds like an internal thing, not important to users. But by bumping up to the latest libraries, we have fixed countless quirks and were able to discover and fix some severe bugs.

Updated translations

The following translations have received some care

  • German
  • Italian
  • Portuguese
  • Russian
  • Spanish
  • Ukrainian

What happened to 0.9.5?

We had a development build named 0.9.5d around for a while, although we never published an official release. To avoid mixups, we skip 0.9.5 and proceed with 0.9.6.

Big thanks to developers

Joshua Scoggins, H. Phil Duby, and A. Faina!

Head to the downloads section, and we hope you will enjoy using it!

Fritzing maintenance release 0.9.4

End of 2019, we crafted a maintenance release of Fritzing, version 0.9.4. There was no announcement on this blog, as things were quite in movement. So, as we add it, the following is old news. fritzing 0.9.4 release class=

Version 0.9.4 is a maintenance release. There are few new features, but we fixed some of the bugs.

Critical bug fix for autorouter

Fixed a memory corruption that would cause random crashes. Thanks to Filipp Mikoian for your help.

Color-coded wires
A new option was added to colorize wires according to their length automatically.
Transport Layer Security

Long overdue, Fritzing now uses transport layer security for all links. This will mostly affect the part updates, since parts are hosted at github, and they will not allow unsecured access for much longer. For some time, the Fritzing website continues to allow HTTP for older versions of the Fritzing application. This way, update checks, and the projects gallery will continue to work.

Fix a bug where Fritzing would potentially search the whole disk for parts

Depending on installation location, Fritzing might try to search many subfolders for its parts. Depending on the machine's speed and directory structure, this would take a long time, during which Fritzing would show "Application does not respond" or similar. The workaround was to wait about ten minutes until it finishes, as it only happens on the first start. This annoyed many users, our apologies, this behavior should be fixed now.

No 32 bit builds
We don't provide 32 bit builds of Fritzing anymore. It might still be possible to build for 32 bit.
Under the hood

We dropped Qt4 support

Continuous builds for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. This means faster release cycles in the future.

Use libgit 0.28.1

New/updated Translations
  • Russian thanks to Alexey Loginov
  • Indonesian, thanks to Rizqy H
  • Slovak, thanks to jose1711
  • Slovenian, thanks to Filip Stamcar
  • German
  • French
  • Bulgarian, thanks to Lyubomir Vasilev

Thanks to Chris Mayo, Peter Van Epp, Ben Williams, Michael Anderson, and Roman Vekshin. Thanks to the guys at Aisler.net, without whom this release would not have been possible.

New fritzing release 0.9.3b!

Finally, here's a fresh release of fritzing, coming with a nice set of new features. Head on over to fritzing.org/download to grab it. github parts repo class= Here's what's new:

Continuously updated parts library

The fritzing parts library is now stored online at github and is automatically checked for updates on every launch. This means you will now get new parts (or fixes) in the moment when they are created. No need to wait for the next Fritzing release to get new parts anymore! And we are actually using git itself inside of fritzing to do these updates, so this opens up many other use cases in the future, like for example direct user contributions.

Critical bug fix for messed up PCB traces

Many of you have been plagued by an annoying bug that occasionally caused PCB traces to get loose and flip around. It proved to be really tricky to track down but it's finally fixed, sigh.. Plus, the fix will recover any files that have been mangled by this bug. :)

High-DPI display support

Fritzing now looks properly on High-DPI (aka Retina) displays on all platforms. It's not really high-res but scaling nicely according to the higher screen resolution. No more eye squinting with your fancy 4K screen!

Easier handling of self-created parts

Custom / self-made parts and bins used to be stored in a hidden location on your hard drive, which made it really annoying to edit them with an external tool such as Illustrator or a text editor. They are now conveniently located in your ~/Documents/Fritzing folder for easy access!

Load/Save uncompressed fritzing files (.fz)

You can now alternatively save your fritzing sketches as an uncompressed set of files (.fz plus additional custom parts etc). This allows for proper versioning with systems like git or svn. For regular use, we still recommend using the standard .fzz format, which by the way is just a zip bundle of these files. Thanks to Sergio Oller (zeehio) for this contribution!

File type associations & icons

fzz, fzb, fzp, etc. now also have shiny file icons on Mac OS X (thanks to scribblemaniac) and Ubuntu Linux (thanks to el-j).  To get them to actually show up, you will need to wait a little on Mac for them to override the cache, and on Linux  you have to run the install-fritzing.sh script.

New Parts

Loads of new parts, many of them contributed, and all  revised by Fabian Althaus (el-j): Lots of new SparkFun parts, thanks to support from SparkFun: Contributed parts:

New/updated Translations

  • Czech, thanks to Vasekdvor
  • German, thanks to Atalanttore and aknoerig
  • Italian, thanks to Gianpaolo Macario
  • Polish, thanks to jacekjaros
  • Portuguese, thanks to Bruno Ramalhete
  • Spanish, thanks to bazza
  • Turkish, thanks to Kaan Özdinçer
  • Vietnamese, thanks to Duyệt Đinh Xuân
..and various smaller improvements and fixes, including contributions from Duane Johnson, Luke Benstead, Nicolas Raynaud, scribblemaniac and duff2013. Thanks!

New Book: "Fritzing for Inventors"

There are a zillion books that make use of Fritzing to illustrate circuits, but this one is the first on fritzing itself. We're honored that the one and only Simon Monk, author of many a maker book, took it up and created the ultimate guide for using fritzing to "take your electronics project from prototype to product." We provided technical review for the book, so you can be sure it's using all the tricks. Fritzing for Inventors class= It does a really great job at  giving a quickstart introduction. Then it walks you through each of Breadboard/Schematic/PCB view in detail, and also gives you background tips on approaching electronics projects in general, reading datasheets, etc. The second half of the book focuses on PCB design and production all the way to testing and distribution. It's all very thorough and keeps a great balance between bird's eye and detail discussion. So it's not just a  software reference, but a really practical handbook on creating prototypes and using Fritzing as the central tool for that. All in all, "Fritzing for Inventors" might be a great holiday read. Here's the full table of contents (the one on the publisher's website seems to be from a draft version):
  • Ch 1. Introduction to Fritzing
  • Ch 2. Quickstart
  • Ch 3. Electronic Invention
  • Ch 4. Breadboarding
  • Ch 5. Schematic Desgin
  • Ch 6. PCB Layout
  • Ch 7. Fabrication
  • Ch 8. Fritzing Arduino (and Other Boards)
  • Ch 9. Custom Parts
  • Ch 10. Example Projects
  • Ch 11. Testing
  • Ch 12. Funding and Distributing
  • Appendix: Resources