Design breadboards, circuits and PCBs

Building an electronic circuit – perhaps for interfacing external devices to a single board computer like a Raspberry Pi or Arduino – is commonly carried out on a breadboard. This might be as far as you need to go, but if you’re building the circuit as part of a practical project, then breadboarding is just the start. It really needs to be rebuilt in some other form for use in a real-world project. Alternative methods of electronic construction involve either using a stripboard if you’re only going to build a single circuit, or a printed circuit board (PCB) if you either need to build several or if you want to publish your design for others to build.

Fritzing is an electronic CAD package that was designed for electronics enthusiasts and the maker community. It provides three different views of a circuit – breadboard or stripboard design, the schematic, and the PCB layout – and enables you to switch between them. What’s more, making changes in one view results in those changes also being reflected in the other views.

Mostly free

is unusual in that, even though it’s open source, the executable code can no longer be downloaded freely from the website (). Instead, you can only download it (for Windows, Mac or Linux) if you support the project by making a contribution of at least 8 Euro. If this goes against the grain, you can compile the source code yourself from Github or, if you don’t feel confident to do that, you might find it in