Creating Logic Circuits in CircuitVerse

Written by Josh Heng on Friday 17th January 2020

InstructionsCircuitVerse

CircuitVerse is a free and open source platform for creating and testing digital logic circuits. It's supported by a large, international community and also includes sharing capabilities, groups and educational resources.

Disclaimer - I have contributed to the development of CircuitVerse and have been asked to write this blog post

What is CircuitVerse and What Can You Do?

CircuitVerse provides an online simulator, where users can construct and share digital logic circuits. It also provides an Interactive Book which covers the basics of digital logic design.

The circuit below is an asynchronous counter, made in CircuitVerse. It's interactive - you can increase the count by clicking the button.

Creating Circuits

Circuits can be created in the simulator.

The GUI

Here is a quick run through of the UI:

The left toolbar provides the Circuit Elements menu and properties for the entire project or a specific component.
The top bar provides quick actions that can be performed on the project, such as saving, loading and exporting to images.
The grid on the right is the main window, where your circuit can be assembled and connected.
Scrolling up and down will zoom in and out.
Dragging (without selecting an object) will pan the view.

Assembling Circuits

Components can be added by dragging and dropping an element from the left menu.
Wires can be created by dragging on the green nodes.
Inputs can be toggled by clicking on them.

To begin with, try just dragging a simple input and output element to the grid, connecting them and seeing what happens.

Saving and Loading Circuits

Circuits can be saved online or offline. I would always recommend saving circuits online.
An online save will require you to create a free account and allows sharing and accessing your circuits from other devices.
An offline save saves the circuit in your local browser cache.
When saving a circuit, you can enter its details.
Tags and a description can be added to explain what your circuit does.
You can set the visibility of your circuit to public, private or limited access.

Sharing and Embedding Circuits

Circuits can be shared publicily by setting your project visibility to public.
Circuits can be shared to specific people by sending someone the URL of your circuit and setting your project visibility to limited access.

Circuits can also be embedded onto your website. To do this, click the embed button on the project page and copy the code provided. This will result in an interactive circuit like the one below:

Forking Circuits

Forking circuits in CircuitVerse works in a similar way to forking repositories in GitHub. It allows you to edit an already-published circuit made by someone else, keeping your changes in your own 'fork.' To fork a circuit, click the fork button on the project page.

Assignments

CircuitVerse also offers the opportunity to create groups and assignments. This is primarily based for education scenarios, but anyone can do it!

Go to your groups page by clicking on your account name in the top right corner.
Click new group to create a group and give it a name.

Group members can then be added by entering their email. Existing users will receive an invite, whereas new users will get an email asking them to sign up.

Assignments enable you to create a task for your group members. In an assignment, you can choose to restrict the circuit elements used, set deadlines and grade responses. Groups are a widely used feature on CircuitVerse by universities - students can be set assignments to do in their own time, to reinforce their understanding of digital circuits.

Conclusion

So, that's it for CircuitVerse! If you have any questions, feel free to comment below. And if you haven't already, check it out at CircuitVerse.org.

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