Synthesis Studios

I recently attended the kick-off workshop for Fritzing, an open-source initiative to help artists and designers turn their electronic prototypes into products. Fritzing was initiated by Reto Wettach at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam (just outside of Berlin) in collaboration with André Knörig and Zach Eveland. They plan to create a schematic editor and PCB layout tool that’s easy-to-use for people new to electronics. The goal is two-fold: first, to allow people to document and share the things they’ve made, and, second, to help get them manufactured. In this way, Fritzing builds on and extends the current trend towards homemade and DIY electronics embodied by projects like Arduino and Make Magazine.

Fritzing builds on and extends the current trend towards homemade and DIY electronics. by first allowing people to document and share the things they’ve made, and second helping get them manufactured.

The reason I was involved is because of my work on Arduino, an open- source platform for electronics prototyping — i.e. making the things that Fritzing will help people document and manufacture. Arduino originated at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, where I got a Masters in interaction design. It’s since grown into quite a wide- spread project, with thousands of users around the world, and is used in a number of universities. We were lucky enough to be there as the interest in DIY electronics started to take off and the project expanded quickly. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s rewarding to see the amazing things that people have been able to make as a result. At Synthesis, I’m lucky enough to get to spend 20% of my time working Arduino, which lets me accomplish a lot more than I could in my spare time. (Yet another reason this place rocks.)

To get the project started, Reto and company invited people working in the field of physical computing to a one-day workshop in Potsdam. The day began with people presenting their design work and teaching activity to provide a sense of the types of projects Fritzing needs to support. Then we had longer introductions to the three main aspects of Fritzing: the interface, its implementation, and the community. I was asked to give the latter presentation and to facilitate the group discussion on community that afternoon. In my talk, I posed a bunch of questions about the desired structure and priorities for the community, and made a few simple suggestions - it’s not an easy subject to cover in a 20 minute talk. In the group discussion, we tried to break down the various groups who’d be interested in Fritzing, talked about the needs for the community portion of the website, and discussed some open-source and licensing issues. It was a fascinating conversation and I learned a lot from everyone who participated. At the end of the day, we reconvened to share each group’s conclusions and recommendations. It sounds like the guys have a great plan for the interface and implementation and we should see the first revisions before too long.

It’s great to see initiatives like Fritzing with goals similar to those of Arduino. Not only does it give us some confirmation that we’re doing something worthwhile, but it should provide our users with a great new tool for taking their prototypes to the next level. Check out the Fritzing website for the latest news, and keep your eyes out for the first wave of Fritzing-created products. It won’t be long!

Tags: ardunio, fritzing, make, open source, pcb, potsdam

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Synthesis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.