In Part 2, we will see how to use the breadboard/schematic designs to generate a PCB layout that we can use to have a circuit board fabricated. In this first installment, we will follow Figure 1 to build a circuit on a breadboard that we can use with some Arduino code, then we will convert the breadboard design to a schematic. This episode will cater a bit to the hardware novice by introducing Fritzing, which can help a beginner get started with hardware design.įirst, we will use Fritzing to design a DS1307 RTC circuit we were introduced to in Workshop 48. I’ve been slowly introducing the C programming language software while also applying these concepts to microcontroller hardware projects so that folks from both ends of the spectrum can get some incentive to learn the parts they don’t already know. Most readers are somewhere in between having enough hardware and software knowledge to be dangerous, but still learning both. Others can hand-solder surface-mount parts on PCBs of their own design but can barely use an Internet browser, much less write a program. Some folks can program circles around me, but wouldn’t know which end of a soldering iron to use if their life depended on it. I am constantly reminded about the great variety of skill levels present in readers of my Workshops.

You can get more information from Fritzing It is open source, so there are contributors from all over the world.

So, I decided to put our study of time on the shelf and do two workshops on Fritzing, then come back to how C programmers deal with time later.įritzing is being developed by the Interaction Design Lab of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany. Even though it is still in beta, it has many very interesting and useful features. Fritzing is a very novice-friendly open software package that you can use to design shields for Arduinos. Then, right in the midst of exploring these concepts I stumbled across Fritzing - an open source application that attempts to do for hardware design (electronics computer-aided design) what the Arduino did for software. In the lab section, we got started with the DS1307 real time clock (RTC) IC.

In the C theory section of our last episode, we looked at C programming concepts for enums and data structures.

Fritzing variable power supply