It’s great for making all those more artistic PCBs, like badge add-ons and such, because you don’t have to jump through hoops and use three different scripts and a manual process to get the PCB (or any other part) shaped exactly as you want. Most PCB CAD tools out there force a very rigid process, forcing you to pre-commit, and making it very difficult to change later. It’s useful for when the schematic is really trivial (say, just display and buttons connected to a MCU), but the shape and layout of the board matters. It’s one of two PCB design tools that let you start with designing the PCB, figuring out which GPIO pins of the microcontroller would be the easiest to route in your particular situation, and once you have that, *then* finishing the rest of the schematic. It is one of the few tools available out there that let you design for your vero-board or other prototyping boards, not only showing you the footprint of the components, but also their real size. Where it shines is a number of areas, actually: Posted in News Tagged fritzing Post navigation There’s never been a better time to get started in Fritzing. With these new developments, and entirely new generation of hardware makers can dip their toes into the world of hardware development the easy way, and an entirely new generation of Open Source developers can work on making Fritzing the best tool it can be. That still doesn’t mean Fritzing isn’t a valuable tool, though. Yes, Fritzing died a terrible death due to legal and funding issues. To that end, there’s also the Freetzing community to rebase the entire project with an emphasis on modularity.

Other developments in store for Fritzing include clearing out the number of open issues, making a new alpha, generally clean up the entire codebase, and prepare for a release.

Future versions of Fritzing will be written in JavaScript.

Fritzing is written in C++ and Qt, and there simply aren’t enough skilled devs to work on it. The biggest takeaway from the GitHub discussion is that there simply aren’t enough developers for Fritzing. Now, things might be turning around: Fritzing is being rebooted by community members, and there’s a roadmap of upcoming features. There were no updates for many months, and members of the community wondered what was going on. Fritzing has been stuck in the mud for just over a year now.

Fritzing free download