Fritzing for Inventors: Take Your Electronics Project from Prototype to Product

by Simon Monk

In this TAB book, bestselling electronics author Simon Monk shows maker-entrepreneurs how to use Fritzing's open-source software and services to create electronics prototypes, design and manufacture printed circuit boards (PCBs), and bring professional-quality electronic products to market. "Fritzing for Inventors: Take Your Electronics Project from Prototype to Product" explains how to use this set of free, open-source electronics prototyping tools to lay out breadboards, create schematics, and design professional-quality printed circuit boards (PCBs). No engineering skills needed! Whether you're a hobbyist, artist, inventor, or student, you'll be able to develop a product from schematic to prototype to professional-quality printed circuit board, all from one easy-to-use software package. Fritzing works well with prototyping boards such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and BeagleBone.

This DIY guide covers the whole lifecycle of product development for a hobbyist entrepreneur. It takes you from initial concept, to prototyping, to PCB production, to distribution. Along the way, it examines the sourcing of components, product testing, and even how to price products for wholesale and retail. Simon Monk is a bestselling TAB electronics author and popular presenter at MakerFaires Well-illustrated tutorial with screen captures, easy-to-follow instructions, and step-by-step projects Describes an up-to-date contemporary approach to PCB design, including surface-mount designs Explains how to become a maker entrepreneur by using crowdfunding and indie marketplaces for technical products

Genres: Technology, Education, Design

240 pages, Paperback

First published April 27, 2015

Reviews

[Manuel Domínguez Álvarez · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are looking for a reference book to understand everything you need to work with Fritzing, this is not your book.

This book is written to people with no engineering skills and maybe it would have been better to name it as "Introduction to Fritzing..." rather than "Fritzing for Inventors". The usage of the word "Inventors" in the title make you to think on the other Simon Monk book's titled Practical Electronics for Inventors. Around 1000 pages of anything you may need for introducing electronics.

And this was, what was expected to be for Simon Monk's followers.

This book introduce Fritzing most important fixtures, in around 25% of the book, and the rest is filled with chapters about electronic components (nothing compare to Practical Electronics for Inventors), soldering technics (nothing compare to Mastering Surface Mount Technology written by Vincent Himpe), testing techniques (nothing compared to Complete Electronics: Self-Teaching Guide with Projects written by by Earl Boysen and Harry Kybett ) and a very fast presentation of InkScape software for creating or editing vector graphics (https://inkscape.org/).

The main problem is that the book is only 200 pages long, so although the chapters distribution may make sense, the book is more a invitation to find a new books to go deeper in that subjects. A real Simon Monk's "Inventor" book.

My suggestions is to encourage Simon Monk to write a new and revision edition of this book. 20$ was the price for 1000 pages Practical Electronics for Inventors, and it is not fair to charge 20$ for 25% of 200 pages of Fritzing.

But if you only need to know 25% it is a good book for you.

[Dan Watts · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the only book currently available that covers Fritzing, a software package with so many features that it's hard to know where to start.

After a few failed attempts to get a grip on Fritzing, this book gave me the boost I needed to get started. That's enough to earn a 5-star review as far as I'm concerned.

Admittedly, the book is far from perfect: about 1/3 is filler content not directly related to Fritzing, leaving just 175-or-so pages to guide you through the software, and the sample projects in GitHub have a few missing pieces. This book is certainly enough to get you started, though, with more details being just a Google search away.