Fritzing is an open-source initiative to develop amateur or hobby CAD software for the design of electronics hardware, to support designers and artists ready to move from experimenting with a prototype to building a more permanent circuit. I recently started using it. The initiative has made the software pay-to-download but the source code is still open-source. This guide will take you through building Fritzing on a Debian based operating system and will require you to have a fair amount of Linux experience. If you don’t and have questions, feel free to post them below in the comments. Happy to help.
To find guides for building Fritzing for other platforms, refer to the original build guide on the Fritzing wiki. This guide from Sytek also helped me figure things out in the build process.
Installing Dependencies
Create a directory called fritzing in your home directory. This will be your workplace for building Fritzing.
mkdir ~/fritzing cd ~/fritzing
Get the source code
The Fritzing code is available for download from the github repository. Currently, the code lives at https://github.com/fritzing/fritzing-app
Clone it like so:
git clone https://github.com/fritzing/fritzing-app.git
You will also want the separate repository containing all component definitions:
git clone https://github.com/fritzing/fritzing-parts.git
Download and install Qt
Free and open-source Qt can be installed using the install Qt Creator. In order to use the open-source licensed Qt, create a account on Qt. This can be done using the Qt Online installer app. After going through the steps, select the Qt version (5.15.x) to install from within Qt Creator. Refer to the original guide for the latest Qt version that would be needed by Fritzing. This is important to get it right. Rest leave it as it is, we need the Qt creator to build and run Fritzing.
Install packages
sudo apt-get libssl-dev libssh2-1-dev libglu1-mesa-dev
Install Boost
If Boost is not already installed on your system, download the latest source version (or use your package manager). Unzip it into the fritzing directory that we created.
Install cmake and libgit2
Pretty sure, you already have cmake but if you don’t then we will need it. Install it using https://cmake.org/install/
Go ahead and download version 0.28.x of libgit2 from the Github releases page. Extract it into your fritzing directory and change the folder name to libgit2.
We will need to build libgit2 using cmake so go ahead and enter the following commands, substituting your chosen path for the fritzing folder.
cd ~/fritzing/libgit2
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF ..
cmake –build .
Running the Project
Navigate to the fritzing-app directory and open the phoenix.pro file using the Qt creator. In Qt Creator, go to the Projects tab, and under Run Settings, add this in the field Arguments:
-f "/path/to/fritzing-app/" -parts "/path/to/fritzing-parts/" -db "/path/to/fritzing-parts/parts.db"
- -f [this flag is required for fritzing to e.g. find the translation-files]
- -parts [find the fritzing parts directory]
- -db [rebuild a clean parts.db from the parts directory]
This is required so that Fritzing can find all the parts, examples, and other data. Use the ‘db’ parameter only once to generate the initial parts database. Press the green play button (green arrow), and Fritzing will compile and launch. It may take several minutes the first time you do this – watch the compile output to see the progress. If you see any errors, then Google and you are bound to find some solution that works or maybe something you missed. There shouldn’t be any issues/errors reported in the build.
After the first build has been completed successfully, remove the DB part like mentioned below so for normal launches you have. Hit that Run button again and Fritzing should automatically load and open for you.
-f "/path/to/fritzing-app/" -parts "/path/to/fritzing-parts/"
Note that this method will only allow you to run fritzing through Qt Creator (screenshot below). If you want to have a standalone executable, check out the release instructions here.
That’s all for now, live in the mix.
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