PCB design - Eagle and Fritzing

By -
Yesterday I got involved in a couple of discussions on Twitter on two related topics: choosing software for PCB design, and choosing PCB Fab companies to make short runs of prototype boards.

I'll write a little about the PCB Fabs in another post. At the risk of having to don flame-proof safety gear, I'll share some of my experience from the last couple of years, and my current preferences.

Quick2Wire Analogue Board

Disclaimer

Please don't expect an exhaustive survey. I don't normally work on Windows, and I don't have a Mac, so this is written from the perspective of a Linux user. That's why I have not tried DesignSPark PCB. Nor have I looked much at KiCad, simply because my first attempts some while ago were discouraging.

Eagle and Fritzing

The two products that I have used are Eagle and Fritzing.

Eagle is very well established as a design tool for amateur and professional users. It's very capable, and has very extensive libraries. Since CADSoft ( the authors) were acquired by Premier Farnell, it has good integration with the Farnell website. Some PCB Fab shops accept Eagle .brd files directly for manufacture, and almost all will accept the gerber files which Eagle can export.

When we started Quick2Wire we decided to use Eagle for all our PCB designs. Two of the team had good Eagle skills, and I was somewhere between novice and competent.

Quick2Wire MCP23017 board
Sadly, one of the Eagle experts was a temporary team member: he'd warned us at the outset that he was involved with a couple of other start-up projects which would eventually have to take priority. (He's gone on to create the very successful Nova).

Even more sadly, the other expert became seriously ill after he'd completed the layouts of our first three boards, and was unable to carry on with the project.

My own expertise was limited, and there were too many other calls on my time for me to ramp up my skill level.

The Eagle learning curve

Another member of the team decided to have a go, and spent several weeks trying to get to grips with Eagle. He's a very bright guy, and his degree was in Electronic Engineering, but he still found Eagle hard to use. His experience mirrored mine when I first encountered the product, and we're not the only ones who have found the Eagle interface hard to master.

Some while before Quick2Wire started I'd come across another software tool called Fritzing. It's open-source software that you can use to capture a breadboard layout. Once you've done so, you can edit the corresponding schematic and go on to produce a PCB design.

Illustrating projects with Fritzing

When I first met it, Fritzing had great potential for illustrating educational material but reports suggested it was a little immature as a PCB deign tool. We made considerable use of its breadboard view but never experimented with the board design capabilities.

With hindsight that was a mistake. When I started work on the lobstar I decided to use Frizting for the PCB design. I made a couple of mistakes before I got the design right, but that's par for the course: Quick2Wire had three runs at each of our boards.

Fritzing for manufacture

Fritzing has been intuitive to use and has generated the files required by the three companies I used to make lobstar prototypes.

I'll tell you who those companies are in a later post, and show you the results.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Controlling a Raspberry Pi Pico remotely using PySerial

By -
Image
Update : I'm using thie code below in another project, and found that I had not correctly fixed the reported bug. The new version passes automated tests, and I am pretty sure it works OK. I have changed the name of the class to Talker  since it can both send and receive information. Apologies to all concerned for the bug! Introduction You can use a Raspberry Pi Pico as a powerful peripheral to a host - a Raspberry Pi, a Jetson Nano, a laptop or workstation. In this article you'll see how to interact with a Pico running MicroPython or CircuitPython by writing some Python code that runs on the host. The software is easy to use. It enables you to send a Python statement to the Pico and read the results. The statement can be any valid MicroPython code. Setting up the host and the Pico For this article I've used a Raspberry Pi as the host, but any computer running Windows, Linux or Mac OS will do so long as it has Python 3.5 or later installed. In particular, you can use this t...
Read more

Five steps to connect Jetson Nano and Arduino

By -
Image
Yesterday's post showed how to link a micro:bit to the Jetson Nano. One of the members of the (unofficial) NVIDIA Jetson Nano group on Facebook asked about connecting an Arduino to the Jetson. Here's a simple recipe for getting data from the Arduino to the Jetson Nano. It should work on all the Jetson models, not just the Nano, but I only have Nanos to hand. On request, I've added a recipe at the end of this post which sends data from the Jetson Nano to the Arduino; it turns the default LED on the Arduino on or off. The recipe for sending data from the Arduino to the Jetson has just 5 stages: Program the Arduino. (I used the ASCIITable example). Connect the Arduino to the Jetson using a USB connector Install pyserial on the Jetson Download a three-line Python script Run the script.   Programming the Arduino I used an Arduino Uno, and checked it on a verteran Duemilanove (above), but any Arduino should work. You'll need to do this step usi...
Read more

Raspberry Pi Pico project 2 - MCP3008

By -
Image
This post show you how to drive the MCP3008 8-channel ADC using a Raspberry Pi Pico. I'll start with a personally embarrassing and annoyingly relevant story. I'll also tell you about a minor 'gotcha' when using SPI on the Pico, and how you can avoid it. Finally, I've include the code and fritzing diagram I used to test the interface. First, the story. Back in 2012, when the Raspberry Pi was fresh and new, I was running a startup called Quick2Wire.  We made add-on boards for the Pi. Just before Christmas we sent out our first batch of boards to a small army of beta-testers. The beta boards didn't work. Somehow a single trace on the pcb had got deleted and one of the GPIO pins was isolated. The boards were still usable and it wasn't too hard to solder in a jumper wire to replace the missing trace, but it was very embarrassing. It wasn't just that we'd shipped boards with a defect. The really annoying thing was that I'd set up an  automated loop-bac...
Read more