Make the pin's name visible

June 21, 2019, 10:40 am

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In pcb view in the right hand window in core in the pcb view section near the bottom drag the text icon (third from the left) in to the board. When you click on (to select) the text on the board, in Inspector (the bottom right window) you can enter the text you want in the text window and it will change on the board (and be propagated to the silkscreen on the board). Most parts in pcb don’t have labels (because they can’t be removed if someone doesn’t want them without making a new part) and so you can add text if you want it.

Peter

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Two different colors for the pin's holes

June 21, 2019, 10:55 am

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I believe this is a Fritzing bug. The green usually indicates a successful connection, but when the connections are all internal to a part (as they are in the top connector) it doesn’t turn green (but if you click on one of the pads they both turn yellow to indicate there is a connection present). The bottom connector has external connections to another component and thus is green. Note the bottom two pins on j2 here are connected but still red, as they are only an internal connection.

Left click and hold on any of the pads turns all connected pads yellow indicating the connections are correct (always a good thing to verify) even though the colors are not.

Peter

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PCB (Board) Cutouts and Creating It - Simplified

June 21, 2019, 2:12 pm

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Couple of things:

Yes, probably not intended. But, as with many things, Work-arounds can often be the trick.
Cutouts can be done as Fritzing intended (there is documentation on this) However, my Simplified approach seems to work better than the intended way. Though I show in my examples the cutouts with a Color-Fill, I did that only to indicate graphically. I could have made the Fill Alpha=0 and displayed the Borders. Too lazy for demo’ing it…
I have US Patents on some Connectors and take a keen interest in Connectors So, would be nice to have an expedient way of doing it (have needed to do that in CAD so, my approach is a step forward in that regard).

The Dummy Way: Only way I’m able to make the Final Result having Cutouts is to make the cutout in the PCB at the desired location. It’s a work-around requiring some fussing to get desired location…

Can use Fritzing’s position feature or my Woof app to get location.

Regarding the Panel indicating No Cutouts: I have had success getting it to identify and list them. But, beyond it’s listing it, there appears to be No need to strive for it as it appears to have Zero affect on anything other than informing user.

The way to get them recognized is Fuss with Boolean, Stroking and Path’ing them until successful. I don’t bother as it was always a ‘Hit & Miss’.

Example Attached is my dummy way of doing it… with image of the Contour and Silkscreen files over-layed (offset by ≈1px for Visual Indication).
It uses my sdCard Part on a PCB with a Cutout for this example…

tofu.fzz (14.6 KB)

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PCB (Board) Cutouts and Creating It - Simplified

June 21, 2019, 3:38 pm

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[Peter] In case you’re interested in confirmation of Successful recognition of Cutouts… Attached

Real_Cutouts.fzz (1.6 KB)

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Two different colors for the pin's holes

June 26, 2019, 6:54 am

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Thank you Peter, that’s very clear

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Futures discussion on github

June 26, 2019, 2:21 pm

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I got an E-Mail message from “Kjell Morgenstern” today. I replied to it, but it got an error:
kjell@gmx.de: host mx00.emig.gmx.net[212.227.15.9] said: 550-Requested action
not taken: mailbox unavailable 550 invalid DNS MX or A/AAAA resource record
(in reply to MAIL FROM command)

I think he is on this forum, since he got the URL of the github repo from here.

The gist of my reply was:

I’m guessing you don’t have doxygen (and LaTeX) installed and the
documentation files did not get built, and thus the documentation resources
file was not built.

You could also edit main.cc and comment out the call to
qInitResources_htmldoc(). That should get rid of the link error (but the help
menu will be non-functional).

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Mid-Mount SMD Part Creation

June 27, 2019, 8:24 am

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Sorry for the delay. Here are the two Fritzing Projects.
WorkingGerberExport.fzz (3.1 KB)
NotWorkingGerberExport.fzz (2.8 KB)

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Mid-Mount SMD Part Creation

June 27, 2019, 11:08 am

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Looks like you’ve gained a good understanding of ‘how’ to do it.

The “NotWorkingGerberExport” shows two elements on top of one-another (image below).

You didn’t post the SVG so, no comment other than to check it out and see what&why…

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Mid-Mount SMD Part Creation

June 27, 2019, 3:22 pm

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No problem, I’m retired and time is not an issue :-), thanks for the files, they have already been illuminating (and I have only started!). Looks like this is a fragile process, when I removed the translates from the not working svg (which is recoverable from the fzz file, I’ll write up how to do that later), it screws up big time:

in this gerber output the purple lines are the non translated not working version (which displays correctly in Inkscape and Fritzing pcb view) and the orange is the working svg (without the translates removed.) I’ll have to look at the path in detail to see what is different. Meanwhile here are the two svgs recovered from the fzz file:

NotWorkingGerberExport.svg

NotWorkingGerberExport

WorkingGerberExport.svg

WorkingGerberExport

for any one else that would like to poke, the forum is happy with svgs today, so right click on the image and hit “save Image as” to save the svg. I’ll continue poking to see if I can figure out why there is such a difference in what should be identical xml. I still don’t know enough about creating paths to get this done successfully from scratch like you guys are able to, but at the moment I don’t need slots so that’s OK and I know who to ask if I do need slots :slight_smile: .

Peter

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SVG - Understanding The Basic's

June 27, 2019, 4:33 pm

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Posting this in it’s own ‘Post.’ For a good understanding of SVG - This Tutorial

Fritzing is designed to use SVG Tiny 1.2 - This Is Specification

Programs/Applications that manipulate drawing elements (such as Difference, Subtraction, etc) do it via code that acts on drawn lines/objects using a combination of methods. Some do better at it, some, not so good. Hence, all the various menu items seen in those app’s.

However, There are a few intrinsic manipulations that SVG can do: This Example will Subtract an Inner Box from an Outer Box. It is done by simply defining the corner points for the Outer Box in a Clockwise direction (Called ‘Winding’) and defining the Inner Box’s corner points CounterClockwise (called ‘Unwinding’). No Boolean, no fuss…

Example1 (image - I was not able to post the code):
The First “M” winds the outer box, the Second “M” unwinds (thus, an Intrinsic Difference).

Example2:
Examples of items learned from the Tutorial - YES, Fritzing loads it without problems!

09%20PM

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Recovering the pcb outline svg from a .fzz file

June 28, 2019, 2:18 pm

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I recently needed to recover the svg for a board outline with only the fzz file. Because the source svg is in the fzz file. Since I had to do this I figured I document how to do it for other people.

un zip the .fzz file to get the .fz file which is standard xml so edit the fz file with a text editor.
search for the text ’ instance moduleIdRef=“BoardLogoImageModuleID” ’
select the data after ’ <property name=“shape” value=" ’ til ’ </svg> ’ and copy that text in to a new svg file.
You now have an svg file but is quoted, so you need to unquote it to create a svg file that a svg editor will accept it. So edit the file and do the following substitutions (these are for vi or vim)
:1,$s/"/"/g which substitutes all lines (there is currently only one line but later there will be lines) that is the 1.$ part. The s/ substitutes " to " the / ends the substitution, and the g causes substitution for all instances on the line. This should let you modify the command for your editor.
:1,$s/>/>/g to do the greater thans (>)
:1,$s/</</g to do the less thans. Then (otherwise the ones above screw up!)
:1,$s/&#10/\r/g to replace the quoted newlines with a new line

Now if you save the result you can feed it to an svg editor.

Peter

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SVG - Understanding The Basic's

June 29, 2019, 2:20 pm

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I suspect the secret is the " uses a moveTo for closing it, instead of “Z” close path" which is a valuable addition to the knowledge base here. It seems to me that there are bugs in the path render part of the gerber code in Fritzing that are causing the odd results. As far as I can see the path xml for all examples is valid, i.e. it renders correctly both under Inkscape and in Fritzing in pcb view when Qt renders the xml, it only renders incorrectly after gerber processing indicating to me that the problem is in gerber processing not quite rendering all paths correctly. If we can figure out what it doesn’t like, we can (given the necessary knowledge of path creation) manually adjust the path xml to create successful cutouts til we can arrange to fix up the code. That may take a while to do, as someone will need to understand it, and be willing and capable of making the changes. As I said earlier I’d like to see that code change make the slot capability available in a part, which is probably an even bigger yet change, as that is where it will be most useful. When development ramps up again, hopefully someone more experienced than me will step up to do it as it is likely to take me a very long time to be successful at this given how much effort the two simple bug fixes I have already done have been. At the moment I’m poking at the parts factory code with the view to fixing up the scale of headers, making 2mm and 1.27mm headers work correctly (2mm currently makes pads that short together by default in pcb view) and hopefully fix the mess in breadboard with double row connectors (right now I think that should be fairly easy, we will see if it turns out that way :slight_smile: ). For anyone who is a coder, they are accepting pull requests against the development code base on github again, as noted I have a couple of simple fixes accepted.

Peter

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SVG - Understanding The Basic's

June 30, 2019, 3:17 pm

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Had some success with exporting Etchable SVG but, no success exporting Gerber ‘Contour’ files.

The only approach that was half-successful was when using an ID of ‘nonconn’ for the shape (a square for the test - see attached).

Exporting as ‘etchable svg’ produced the necessary files for etching. That’s good.

Of course, no Contour file is exported with SVG and, for my needs, anything less than a Contour file is not usable.

I’m convinced the Current Best approach is doing the cutouts on the PCB-board at the locations needed for a Part requiring cutouts.

Last year I messed with compiling Fritzing using QT and had an issue with lib2… (can’t remember exact issue at the moment). I decided I did not want to spend hours looking at code others created and I ended up deleting the raw fritzing code and moving on.
My version of QT only enables exporting locally for my Mac. So, it’s useless for real programming and multi-platform.

I may write a ‘Java based’ PCB(board)-Making app with a drag & drop ‘cutout’ capability. Thus, I envision: load a Part needing cutouts, drag&drop the cutouts at desired locations, save (i.e., Grab the currently loaded PCB, add the cutout and Save it). Sure, it’s band-aid approach but, would work.

However, as I’m able to accomplish everything I need to do via Hand-coding and/or Gravit, Boxy or Inkscape for Parts and PCB’s, I’ll most likely just watch the progress other are making. No doubt, I may play around more…

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Make the pin's name visible

July 1, 2019, 8:22 am

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Hi Peter,
Sorry for delay to answer you. My account was hod by the admin!

I would like to thank you for your help. I’ve found the text window, and because there is no other way to indicate the pin’s names I’ve used it.
In my opinion the text window is not comfortable to use. In addition, when you already have mentionned the pin’s names in the schematic view, it’s take time to re-write the same pin’s names in the PCB view. So why do we have to make the the same work twice?

For my first project that should work well. I’ve also to improve my experience with Fritzing.

Thanks again.

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Make the pin's name visible

July 1, 2019, 9:02 am

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The idea is to not clutter up the silkscreen on the PCB with text that the user may not want. The text function in PCB view allows the user to add text only where they want it. That said, it is possible (although you have to modify the parts that you use which takes some work) to make a modified part which includes the text in PCB view so that you don’t need to add it again. The folks that created Fritzing don’t recommend doing this, but the capability to do so is there. To do so you need to modify the pcb svg of the part to add the text to it (which also has to be in the schematic svg, so isn’t as automatic as is perhaps desirable). The format of the svgs is fairly complex, but just adding text isn’t all that hard learning to use the svg editor (such as Inkscape) is more difficult if you aren’t familiar with it already.

Peter

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SVG - Understanding The Basic's

July 1, 2019, 9:49 am

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I agree, at present this is the only way to do this I think.

The new team had the same problem, they ended up having to static link the libgit2 library to make it work on the Mac. I assume the development repo on github will have the code to make that happen for anyone who wants to try.

Peter

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SVG - Understanding The Basic's

July 1, 2019, 10:27 am

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Thanks, Peter.
I may (probably will) get the code and see what happens. Won’t rush into it and will report back, if/when doing so…

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Parts search vanished on latest download

July 3, 2019, 2:10 am

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I’ve had this issue of the search option missing for sometime on a Windows 10 PC. I found that Fritzing files were being stored on my OneDrive now. The search bin search.fzb was there. Noting that the my partsd bin was now called My_Parts.fzb I renamed searcj.fbz to My_Search.fbz and hey presto a search appeared in Fritzing bins at the bottom of all the bins. In fact two searches appeared both with magnifiers but one has no entry field for searching. I also note that search.fzb reappeared in the OneDrive directory along with the My_Search.fzb.

Hope this allows you to fix yours (even if a little clumsy solution) and the developers to hunt down a proper solution.

Alan

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How to Add a V-Cut Line in Fritzing?

July 3, 2019, 9:25 am

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I am creating a PCB using the Fritzing software,
and the PCB Printing service that I use (not Fritzing Fab, but something in China),
enables me to add V-Cuts to the design.

How do I do it with the software?

Thank you

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How to Add a V-Cut Line in Fritzing?

July 3, 2019, 12:51 pm

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A forum search for “v cut” turns up the information available on this topic. It looks to be possible as a work around but possibly not that easy (I haven’t tried it) . If you can’t figure it out from the archived posts, post again and perhaps one of those that have done it will help out.

Peter

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