I took Fritzing for a test drive for the first time. After some stuffing around I managed to build it from the git sources on Debian wheezy, I updated their wiki with instructions for that case.

I found it very easy building up a circuit on the breadboard.

However, I found the schematic editor took quite a bit of getting used to, and the auto router just makes completely illogical decisions and added crazy crooked lines all over the place. In the end I just dragged the components around and manually edited the connections, once I worked out that you can just double click to make a bend. Along with a bunch of other UX annoyances I think there is still some polish but it is a useful tool for a quick circuit whip-up anyway.

So here is the circuit for my desktop testing rig.

I can use this to develop and test the telemetry.

The ESP12 arrived today from tronixlabs and the MSP430-SOLAR from dontronics so over the weekend I'll hook those together and start experimenting with deep sleep mode and solar operation, to characterise power usage performance.