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

The Fritzing Starter Kit has been our first attempt in late 2009 to try to generate funding for Fritzing by ourselves. We weren’t sure at all whether it would work out – luckily it turned out to be a big motivation for us and to continue along this way. The kit is very popular and has just crossed 1500 sales!

It’s great to see that our customers are coming from all over the world, from individuals, companies, universities, and secondary schools. Sometimes we get mails from our customers telling us how they are using the kits for classes, which is a great way for us to learn how to improve the kit as well as the Fritzing software.

If you haven’t noticed, the kit is also now available through our resellers tinkersoup and watterott, so that you can get some other gadgets with your order.

To commemorate this nice event, Stefan Hermann has built us a little sales clock that alerts everyone in the IXDS office about a new sale with a nice ka-chinggg (we’ll upload this project soon). Stefan has also been working on a kit update so that it now contains a piezo speaker, a temperature sensor, big resistors and a zener diode for a lot of new project ideas. The next thing will be an “extension kit”, stay tuned!

That’s right - we’re finally coming full circle with the Fritzing project and are soon launching the much-wanted fabrication service that turns your Fritzing sketches into professional printed circuit boards!

So in order to kick it off, we thought why not celebrate this as a fritzmas present to the community. We will produce 24 of your Arduino Shields (or other) designs you made with Fritzing. You will receive two copies for free, including free shipping.

Deadline for receiving your design is December 9th. Head over to the Fritzing fab page to find out how to participate.

A few weeks ago we had the great honor and pleasure to travel far North to the Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden. We were invited by Camille Moussette to participate in their second Interaction Design Summit, as speakers as well as to give a two-day Fritzing workshop. It was an amazing experience and luckily the guys were keen on documenting everything that was happening.

On the first day, we had a series of inspiring talks from renowned pracititioners in the field of interaction design. Besides Reto Wettach and me, there were talks form German Leon (Vodafone), David Rose (Ambient Devices/Vitality), Jan-Christoph Zoels (Experientia), Karsten Schmidt (toxi/postspectacular) and Clive van Heerden (Philips Design). You can watch all the talks on Vimeo.

After that we held a two day long Fritzing workshop with more than thirty students from all over Sweden (and Canada, apparently..). On the first day, we gave an introduction to Arduino and Fritzing, and students gathered in groups to come up with some simple projects. On the second day, we taught them how to translate their circuits into PCB designs. Finally, we got our hands dirty and everyone etched, drilled, and soldered their own Arduino Shield, complete with fancy graphics.

You can find a lot of nice photos from the event here and here.

Thanks to Camille Moussette, Matt Cottam, and all the students and participants for this great experience!

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