Hey Fritzing-folks!

Good news! We have updated the Fritzing website and made it look nice and shiny. And even better: You can now also check out the brand new Fritzing 0.8.5b, released on Dez. 15, 2013.

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Here is a list of changes to the new release:

• Fritzing gets a facelift! (special thanks to Christian and Fabian)
• new Welcome view
• new Fritzing Creator Kit examples (in both English and German)
• Tips and Tricks updated
• First Time Help now a separate dialog
• binaries built using Qt 4.8.5
• updated Dutch translation (thanks Dave)
• updated German translation
• new parts:
  • Breadboard BB 301 (contributed by Jeremy)
  • RGB LED WS2812
• bug fixes:
  • Mac OSX Mavericks Parts Bin Hover crash
  • Saving files with custom parts: sometimes the fzp did not list the latest svg files
  • Boost 1.54 bug no longer crashes Fritzing
  • Many part tweaks

This is a high-level summary of changes between each release. If you’re interested in the detailed changes, take a look at the individual code changes.

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

By popular demand, the RadioShack 276-150 stripboard has been added to release 0.8.1. However, you won’t find it as a separate part in the Parts Bin. To access it, drag-and-drop the regular stripboard part into your sketch, then find the ‘layouts’ drop-down in the Inspector and select the 276-150 option.

This may seem a little indirect, but here is the logic: our stripboard strips now run both horizontally and vertically (before they ran only horizontally). This means it’s now possible to cut/uncut strips into arrangements which we call layouts. The 276-150 is one of these layouts, but since we have had so many requests for it, we decided to “store” the layout with Fritzing so people don’t have to make it from scratch each time.

It would be easy to store other layouts with Fritzing. If you have a favorite stripboard layout that you think people would like to use, make the layout on a stripboard in a Fritzing sketch, and email the resulting file to info:at: fritzing :dot: org. In the email, tell us what part you’ve represented or why the layout is so useful. You may see that layout in a subsequent release of Fritzing.

Enjoy,

– Your Fritzing Team

Well, almost 1000–certainly 900+. The image above is just a small fraction of the set of new parts available in Fritzing 0.8.1. The parts all come originally from the open source SparkFun Eagle Library (thank you SparkFun!) and the conversion was carried out partly by program, and partly by hand. You can thank our illustrator Fabian for so many beautiful breadboard view images. This new heatsink is one of my favorites:

Originally we intended to ship these parts with a new Parts Bin UI to make it easier to navigate through them all. Alas, the Fritzing project being perpetually undermanned–and the demand for these parts being so high–we decided to put off the UI work until later. So the new parts simply arrive in nine shiny new Parts Bin containers, with nine new tabs to click in the Parts Bin window. Another shortcoming is that the new parts have not been completely integrated (from a database point-of-view), so part-swapping is mostly not possible between core parts and the new parts.

But we have a good workaround for these missing features. The Parts Bin search function (the topmost tab in the Parts Bin window) is quite effective for finding parts, especially since we have added a new ‘and’ search. Just separate the terms with spaces; the image below shows an ‘and’ search for parts matching both ‘db’ and ‘25’.

The other goal we didn’t reach in this release was to enforce a single schematic-view image standard (based on a 0.1 inch grid), instead of the current hodge-podge (the majority based on a 7.5mm grid). The new parts all use the new standard, and we plan to convert the rest of the core parts in the next release or so. In the image below, examples from the old ‘standard’ are on the left, examples of the the new standard are on the right (the image is zoomed to 200%).

Despite the work we left unfinished, the addition of a thousand new parts is quite a big step forward for Fritzing. We hope you find these parts as useful as we already have.

Enjoy,

– Your Fritzing Team

Hello Fritzing Fans,

We’re using images from a PCB design by Bob64 (who we thank for giving us permission) to illustrate the new DRC (Design Rules Check). On the left is the DRC from version 0.7.9 and earlier. In the middle is the same file using the DRC from version 0.7.10.  The image on the right is a close-up from the upper region of the middle image so you can see the new highlighting.

The new DRC has no trouble dealing with diagonal lines or rotated pinheaders. The tradeoff is that it is quite a bit slower than the old DRC (it puts up a progress bar while in process), but is much more accurate.

This means the results are much more specific, and we now display these in a modeless dialog. In other words, you can work with the PCB layout while the highlighting remains visible–you can see where you need to make changes, and make them on the spot. Here is what the dialog looks like after we run the DRC on the board illustrated above:

When you click on an entry in the list, the referenced parts are selected, thus making it easier to see where the problem is.

Hope you enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed building it.

Cheers,

The Fritzing Team.