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  A T flip-flop

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  The empty screen

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  Components available and example connections

cirkvito

Ever wanna quickly check your Intro to CS Logic course homework without firin' up the ol' Quartus-Beast? Love circuits, but hate Java applets? Or maybe you're dying to make yourself a shiny half-adder but don't have the time (or dexterity) to fashion one out of physical components?

Inspo

Enter cirkvito (serk-vee-toh)! Circuits are awesome but finding good software to simulate them is hard. We chose to build a tool to provide ourselves with an alternative to clunky and overly-complex Flash or Java applets. (Appropriately, its name is a translation of the word "circuits" in Esperanto.) Ableson's The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs mentioned this idea, too.

What it Does

cirkvito is a drag and drop single-page-app that simulates simple circuits. You click and drag components on the page and connect them in whatever way you want and end up with something cool. Click buttons to zoom in and out, hold the space bar to pan around, and shift-click to select or delete multiple components.

Some Challenges

We built cirkvito with a lot of JavaScript by taking advantage of canvas and jQuery. We learned that UI is really hard to get right by rolling our own buttons and zoom/recenter system.

What We're Proud of

We're proud that cirkvito successfully simulates not only combinational circuits like adders, but also sequential circuits with flip flops made from elementary logic gates (albeit with a manual "clock"). Also, we designed the data structures to represent circuit components and the way they're connected on our own.

What's Next?

A fully-responsive app that's able to resize components depending on the window size would have been nice to have. Also, being able to support custom circuits (allowing builders to "bundle" custom configurations of logic gates into black boxes) would make it easier to build more complex circuits.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript