Fritzing useable for pcb's?

I doubt that Fritzing offers a similar set of content.

Not quite as much, from what I have seen, but its open source with an open format; it is fairly easy to create your own parts (at least from what I gathered from my brief investigation of it); the parts are defined in XML files, IIRC - with SVG for the actual part schematic design and PCB footprints, and a bitmap for the representative part for the breadboard view.

Its that part that I think is awesome, if they could just fix everything else (and if people would quit kvetching about the lack of parts and design more for the project - like other open source projects) - I just love the way you can go from a breadboard design (with parts that look like the parts on your breadboard), to a schematic, to a PCB - with the netlist following.

Heck, if it were possible to break off that one piece and add it to gEDA...

As I said before - I think it has potential. There's also a good chance it won't go anywhere. People love the fact that Eagle has all these parts, but no one seems to care about the fact of Eagle's cost, or the fact that it is closed source (should EagleSoft ever go out of business - what then? - hopefully someone else will buy the software, but that's no guarantee). Both gEDA and Fritzing (and kicad) are open source, just like the Arduino - yet hardly anybody uses them or thinks about them.

I find it strange, but I also suspect it has a lot to do with the Windows fan-base, too (where certain open source projects just go completely unnoticed and languish on the vine - granted, AFAIK, gEDA has not been ported to Windows)...

:slight_smile: