That's it, pretty much. A well-drawn schematic is important to visualizing how a circuit works, separate from how it looks.
I mean, here is a pretty nice Fritzing project I downloaded from their main site.
The "breadboard" view is really nice, and makes good use of features of Fritzing that are rare in "professional" packages. Looks like a good "how-to", uses different wire colors for different signals, etc.
It's clear that some work went into creating this, and I have no major complaints about it.
(ok, I take that back, some of the things that are supposed to be connected aren't - they're just drawn overlapping.)
But the "schematic" that I'd want to look at to tell "how it works", looks like this:
It's AWFUL and pretty much USELESS. I guess you could blame that one whoever drew this, but ... I see this LOTS - pretty much any time I look at a Fritzing based project.
Last time I tried working with fritzing, this was what Fritzing would give you if you originated your circuit as the breadboard diagram - it doesn't even arrange the components "similarly" to the breadboard, and it seems to be pretty difficult to move things around manually. And the schematic editor isn't very good if you START with the schematic, either
That last diagram is often called a RAT’S NEST for good reason...
It’s only usually used as an interim step on the way to a PCB layout, generated along with a NETLIST of all connections.
It’s meant to visualise what the PCB layout program is going to read, and there for the designer to check, but isn’t intended for ‘publication’ !
westfw:
It's clear that some work went into creating this,
Not in my book. What is the purpose of the pink blue and grey wires and the red and black wires next to them. None of them seems to be connected to anything - but you have to (well I have to) spend a considerable time looking at the diagram just to be sure of that. (And my point will be made even more effectively if I have got it wrong)
I only looked at all because of @roibn2’s remark about the pink, blue and grey wires. Which indeed go nowhere, so unless they are somehow exploiting the small capacitance between the parallel rails of the bread board are indeed odd.
I saw the 9 volt battery, hitch also looked fishy because I don’t use Vin, ever, so thought it was meant to be 5 volts…
Yeah, so I agree with myself, I’ll stick to schematics of the older fashion and just skip looking at Fritzings for the most part.
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