Cirkit Designer | a Tool for Designing and Diagramming Circuit Projects

Cirkit Designer is a free tool that specializes in designing and diagramming circuit projects, with an emphasis on realistic component representations.

I've had success creating professional diagrams for several of my projects using Cirkit Designer, so I've created a tutorial for others demonstrating how to design a circuit with this tool.

The first step in designing your circuit is to find the parts for your circuit in Cirkit Designer's parts library. You can search for a part by name or scan through various part categories. If you still can't find the part you are looking for, Cirkit Designer also has a very intuitive custom component creator, which I will talk more about in a follow-up tutorial!

You can add parts from the components library by clicking and dragging onto the circuit canvas.

As you can see here, Cirkit Designer supports free-floating parts (such as the Arduino) as well as snapping parts onto a breadboard. You can identify the parts / pins snapped to a breadboard, because they are colored blue.

To place a wire, simply click on one pin, drag to a second pin to connect, and release!

You'll notice that the wire is auto-routed around other components. This is a really cool feature that has saved me a ton of time building diagrams. I can even drag a component that has already been fully wired up, and all of the wires will be re-drawn automatically!

To complete my circuit, I'll connect all of the remaining pins.

You may find it difficult to debug your circuit in Breadboard View, especially due to the clutter of the breadboard.

Cirkit Designer also offers a view called Net View, where the breadboard is removed, and electrical connections are shown as nets rather than individual wires.

This alternative view can be quite helpful when debugging a mistake in the circuit.

After I've finished laying out my circuit, I have a couple of ways to export my project.

I can export a PNG or SVG rendering of the circuit diagram.

I can also share my project to the cloud. Cirkit Designer gives me a project URL (https://www.cirkithub.com/cirkit-project-view/55) which I can use to reference my own project, or to share with others!

That's it for my first tutorial of Cirkit Designer!

I'll be writing a follow-up tutorial soon on the custom components creator, and I'll continue to add more tutorials as Cirkit Designer adds new features.