Introduction
Fritzing is an open-source hardware design platform that is used by hardware designers, students, artists, and anyone who might be interested in making or just exploring hardware.
Fritzing comes with many common parts that you can use straight away to design your own circuit. In this tutorial, you will learn how to drag and drop the parts that you need and connect them together with wires to form a complete circuit.
Fritzing is free to download and install at Fritzing.org.
Designing Your Circuit
Let’s start off with a simple LED circuit with Arduino Uno.
Click on the search icon and type in “arduino uno” You can see a few parts listed. Go ahead and look for the arduino uno and drag it into the workspace.
You will notice the arduino uno is blocking the breadboard. Let’s zoom out on the view so we can arrange the parts properly.
Click on the minus icon to zoom out. Then drag the arduino uno in place.
Perfect! Now we got our board set up. You can also move the view around by pressing and holding the middle mouse button.
Let’s add in some LEDs and resistors to complete our circuit.
Switch back to the “CORE” view in the parts library and drag 3 LEDs and 3 resistors onto the breadboard.
But wait, how do I change colours for my LEDs? Simply click on the LED and change the colour property from the ”Inspector” window.
Next, let’s join them up with wires. Click the hole on the breadboard and drag it to the arduino uno pin. You can join to any digital or analog pins.
Join the cathode of the LED to the ground rail by the side on the breadboard. Then join a wire from the ground rail to the arduino uno GND.
Finally, change the colour of the ground wire to black so we can identify it easier.
Right click the wire and mouse over “Wire Color” > “black”
We can also tidy up the wires to make it more readable like so.
Great job! You have completed a simple traffic light circuit!
Hold on, before we celebrate let’s check the schematic first.
Oh no, the schematic is in a mess! Although Fritzing allows you to create circuit easily, we still need to tidy up to make it more readable.
Let’s go ahead and rearrange the parts.
Now this looks much better! But what are those dotted lines flying around?
Those are ratsnest lines, it shows you where you are supposed to connect the wire based on your breadboard circuit you designed earlier. The ratsnest lines guides you to prevent joining the wires to the wrong parts.
Let’s go ahead and join the wires based on the ratsnest lines.
Did you notice the red ends from the parts are now green? This means that the part is connected correctly. You can also double check from the status bar below, it will show “Routing completed” once all parts are connected.
And there you have it, a completed circuit and schematic!
Completing Your Circuit
Now that you have completed your circuit design, you can start programming your traffic light. Tag us at #buildwithkuriosity with your completed design!
Resources
- Fritzing Software: Click Here