Sharing hardware projects with Fritzing

As I started with my first experiments with the, recently bought, Arduino board (I'm mainly reproducing examples provided with development software) I've also started looking for a good program for sharing circuit schematics. There are many Linux programs to draw circuit schematics, I played a little with KiCad for example, but usually these programs aren't suited for producing images to be shared on the net. This is not surprising if you think that usually a circuit CAD program is required to produce high quality output for printing (or plotting) of very complex hardware projects while my requirements were quite the opposite. What I was looking for was a program to easily produce low quality images of very simple circuits.

Fritzing

Fritzing is a open source tool specifically aimed to the documentation, sharing and teaching of electronic projects. I downloaded the Linux 32 Bit version from the download page and extracted it in "/opt/" folder:

sudo mv fritzing.2010.04.16.linux.i386.tar.bz2 /opt/

sudo tar xvjf fritzing.2010.04.16.linux.i386.tar.bz2

then I started it by executing the "Fritzing.sh" script

New toy on the desk: Arduino 2009

Sunday there's been, here in Genoa, the usual twice-a-year surplus fair where I'm used to go looking for some cheap and unusual hardware. I come back with, among various things, a little “Arduino Duemilanove” board. (“Duemilanove” stands for 2009 in Italian).

Test drive: Kubuntu 10.4 Netbook edition (live) on the EEEPC 900

During the recent test about Ubuntu 10.4 Netbook I noticed that also Kubuntu (the KDE based Ubuntu derived distribution) has made available a Netbook edition distribution. I couldn't so resist not to give it at least a quick look.

Image download and preparation

Preparing a bootable SD card is almost not worth mentioning considered how simple this operation has become. I downloaded, using Bittorrent, Kubuntu Netbook edition (beta) from here and then used Ubuntu boot-disk creation utility to prepare the bootable media.

Happy Easter

I'll hardly write a new post before Sunday so let me say everybody ... HAPPY EASTER!