board

I wrote last month about an Arduino program for emulating a BMW CD changer. That program has been working well for me but the actual Arduino connection has been a mess. I kept a loose Arduino rattling around in my trunk with little jumper wires connecting it to the IBUS and audio connectors in the trunk.

I found Fritzing while searching for a better answer. Fritzing is a combination tool and service. As a software tool, Fritzing is to Eagle what the Arduino IDE is to Emacs. As a service bureau, Fritzing is to PCBexpress what iPhoto is to Kinkos. I mean these as kind comparisons for all involved. I actually like Arduino, Emacs, PCBexpress, iPhoto, and now Fritzing.

Fritzing is a graphical tool for building circuits with a handy button that sends the entire assembly back to Fritzing HQ for manufacture. The key Fritzing hook is that it has three views of the circuit you build. The novel view is a breadboard view. You can wire up a device on a virtual breadboard that corresponds, perhaps, to an actual breadboard sitting in front of you. That view can switch to a traditional schematic view and a PCB layout view. I used it in exactly this way to copy my simple IBUS adapter from breadboard and Arduino into the breadboard view and then into a board designed to be an Arduino shield. The entire exercise took minutes, in part because Fritzing has a reasonable set of default libraries built to suit a modern maker.

I submitted my order on October 31. Fritzing told me the batch would run on November 5 and that the board would ship on November 11. It actually shipped on the 13th and it arrived by post yesterday. The cost for one copy of the board and shipping was 33.10 Euro.

I populated the board this morning and put it back in the car. It works fine. The board is mostly headers and has only two components -- a pull-up resistor and a BSS138 MOSFET. The rest is pins for the Arduino, the car data and audio connectors, stereo jack, and aux power for a bluetooth A2DP dongle.

I scavenged the MOSFET and the resistor from the Sparkfun bi-directional level shifter board I had been using. This is an expensive way to buy transistors, but not much worse than other ways to get them in quantity one.

I'm a happy customer. I think I'll try Fritzing to build a home automation board for my Haiku fan.