It has been a great struggle to to do hobby electronics projects when I was studying engineering as there was no single good solution for designing schematics, PCB designing and prototyping. I had to switch between different tools to draw schematics and design PCB. But none seemed to be a good fit for a newbie to learn designing and prototyping. I tried various tools like eagle, procad and other PCB designing tools but they were too complex to learn and for a newbie to get acquainted with EDA tools. Recently I stumbled upon a this nice initiative called Fritzing.
Fritzing is an open-source open-source initiative to support designers, artists, researchers and hobbyists to work creatively with interactive electronics. Using tool you can draw schematics, designing PCBs, teach electronics, prototyping, and share your hobby projects with others. Fritzing is being developed by researchers in the Interaction Design Lab at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany.
The important feature of Fritzing is that you can switch between the three views: breadboard view, Schematic and PCB view. editing in view will automatically reflect the changes in other view as well. Fritzing will simply the whole process of simple electronic projects development. It is good tool for newbies who want to learn Electronic Design Automation Tools (EDA).
To download Fritzing visit http://fritzing.org/welcome/
