Feature requests - modifying wires and components

#1

New user here. I really like the interface.

I’d like to be able to do the following with wires:

  1. right-click to manually change the wire’s color
  2. select the wire and drag one of its ends to change its position
  3. grab the wire and change its shape (to move it around other items). For example, sometimes a wire will cover important points on the breadboard.
  4. add a label to a wire or other component (e.g., LED1, LED2)

I’d also like to be able to change the display color of LEDs (red, green, yellow, white, blue).

#2

Another set of features that would be really useful are a simple set of inputs (e.g., + and -) and outputs. What I’m looking for is just an open set of pins.

In the component editor it would be nice to be able to name pins and to add text to the objects (like + and -).

#3

If you create a text annotation in the program and use a return to make the text into two lines, V1.0 will display two lines, but will display as a single line when exporting the file to a PNG.

Here is my original:

image

#4

This becomes

image

in the export to PNG.

#5

I recognize that 1 and 4 in the post above have basically been fixed in V1.0.

#6

@jimcint Thank you for trying out Cirkit Designer and for the detailed feedback and ideas!

I completely agree that your proposed changes to the wire behavior would be quite useful, so we’ll work on adding them as part of one of the upcoming updates.

Also thanks for identifying the bug with the text-box PNG export. I was able to reproduce, so we’ll work on a fix.

I’d like to understand your proposal for the components editor better. Are you proposing the ability to add text on top of the component, which could be positioned for instance next to a pin as a label? Or am I misunderstanding?

#7

Austin,

Sometimes I would like to add a generic terminal or two that is only connected to the circuit on one end, but that still shows up as a generic input or output. On circuit diagrams, these are often drawn as something like:

-----o

with a label like “+in.” It would be nice to have you add a component to create either single or double sets of terminals that would show up on the net view.

I have since learned how to name pins in the component editor, but I haven’t found any way to link multiple pins (e.g., to create a ground bus).

#8

Jim,

Apologies for not getting back to you sooner, and thanks for clarifying! Okay, I think I understand now, so something like this:
Screen Shot 2021-12-07 at 9.25.23 PM

We can certainly add some generic terminals like this, and also update the component creator so it’s possible to create similar terminals there as well.

Regarding linking multiple pins, we haven’t added a way to do this just yet. I believe the way this is done in Altium is by directly interpreting the pin labels to identify a net, so we can do the same thing here without needing any extra input from the user.

Austin