Tutorial: 1: My First Circuit

This tutorial will serve as an introduction to CircuitSim. You will learn how to use pins, connect wires, and test your new circuit.

Part 1: CircuitSim Overview

After opening CircuitSim, you should see a window that looks similar to the following.

The CircuitSim window has 3 main components

• canvas - this is where you will be creating circuits. Once a component is on the canvas, you can move it by clicking and dragging, connect it to other components via wires, or delete it by hitting the delete key. The canvas is also tabbed, so you can create multiple sub-circuits and use them within your main circuit. You might find this feature useful later on.
• explorer pane - where you’ll find the various electronic components that you might want to use in your circuit. Note that this pane is tabbed. Click on the tab to change which subset of components are displayed. For this tutorial, we’ll be focusing on the wiring tab.
• attribute table - when a component is selected in either the explorer plane or on the canvas, the attribute table will populate with various settings that you can change for each component. For now, we’ll ignore this menu

There are two other components to the CircuitSim window that might be useful

• toolbar - has some commonly used components, and menus to change the global bit size and scale. We won’t be changing the global bit size for this tutorial, but you may want to change the scale if components on the canvas are too small.
• menu - pretty self explanatory.

That’s a lot of information, let’s make it more concrete by creating a basic circuit.

Part 2: Adding Pins

All circuits should have an input pin and output pin

• input pin allows you to interact with the circuit you create. When creating circuits with multiple sub-circuits, the input pin also allows other circuits to interact with it. Think of the input as the “parameters” to a function, where the function is your circuit.
• output pin is where you feed the result of your circuit. When creating sub-circuits, the output output pin allows other circuits to get the result of your computation. Think of the output as the “return value” of your circuit.

Now lets add a single input pin and a single output pin to our circuit.

Click on the input pin button in the wiring tab of the explorer pane. Click anywhere on the canvas to drop the input pin there. Note that you can also move the input pin by clicking and dragging it, delete the pin by hitting the delete key, or change some of the pin’s settings by changing a value in the attribute table.

Repeat the process and add a single output pin to your circuit.

Your final result should look something like the screenshot below.

Note how the output pin currently displays an X as its value. This is expected, because it currently has no value (it’s unitialized).

Part 3: Adding Wires

Lets add a wire connecting the input pin to the output pin. This way, whatever value is given to the input will the passed to the output. If the input is 0, then the output will also be 0.

To add a wire, click on the link (the little nub) attached to the input pin and drag your wire until it connects with the link on the output pin

Your final result should look something like this. Note that the output pin is no longer an X because you’re feeding it the value of the input pin.

Part 4: Testing your circuit

Your circuit is now complete! Now let’s test it.

You can change the input pin from a 0 to a 1 and back by clicking on the pin in Click Mode.

Click on the Click Mode button in the toolbar. Next, click on your input pin. Notice how the values of both the input pin and output pin change to 1.

Also note that in Click Mode, you can examine the value on any wire by clicking on it.

After changing the input pin to 1, CircuitSim should look like this:

You should now have a basic understanding of how to create circuits in CircuitSim

Next tutorial: Tutorial: 2: Creating an XOR Circuit