By now, you may have noticed that CircuitLab was down for a total of about ten hours today. The failure occurred when one of the processes that manages our internal dashboard had to be restarted. In the process of coming back up, the dashboard goes through our log files -- which it turns out have gotten much, much bigger over the last month. Churning through the logs rapidly consumed all the RAM on our primary server, which caused a hard crash that resulted in severe corruption in one of our file systems.
We immediately began attempting to restore, but it quickly became obvious that just patching the current machine back together would only be a very temporary solution. So we began the process of restoring CircuitLab from a backup onto a more powerful machine. We are happy to report that at this point it seems that no data was lost in the server crash, and CircuitLab is now running on a server that is 8 times as fast and can scale with our growing CircuitLab community!
Users who had previously installed the CircuitLab app from the Chrome Web Store should have experienced little to no disruption to their workflow since the editor is able to work offline.
Thank you for your patience during the downtime. We’re very sorry about the outage, and in the coming days, we plan to do a full evaluation of the incident so we can understand exactly what happened and prevent CircuitLab from going down in the future.
If you have any other questions about the downtime, please feel free to contact us.
--The CircuitLab Team
We're excited to announce some new features in the toolbox.
You may already have noticed the new search box at the very top of the toolbox. As the number of available symbols in CircuitLab grows, this search box will become the fastest and easiest way to access those symbols. Another cool feature of the search box is auto-recognition of resistance and capacitance values in the search string. Try typing in "100k resistor" to get a 100k Ohm resistor, ready to drop directly into your schematic!
Based on the feedback we've received from our users, we've also added a dozen new symbols, including crystals, light bulbs and photoresistors, as well as 45-degree (diagonal) resistors, capacitors and diodes, so making those bridge circuits should be much easier now. These new symbols are all listed under the "Unsorted Elements" section, but the quickest way to get to them is using the new toolbox search.
Thank you to everyone who filled out the New Component Request survey. We're working on adding many more of your suggestions in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!
We are excited to announce that CircuitLab is now integrated with the Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange site! Users can now insert a CircuitLab schematic directly into their question or answer.
If you’re unfamiliar with Stack Exchange, they host a network of community-moderated question & answer sites covering any number of topics, from databases to gaming to home improvement. The main site in their network is StackOverflow, which deals mostly with computer programming. Electronics Stack Exchange focuses specifically on electronic design, which is a perfect fit for CircuitLab!
Before this integration, we were already noticing people posting screenshots from CircuitLab as part of their question on Electronics Stack Exchange. This was cool, and it was aligned with our mission of allowing people to sketch, simulate and share their circuits anytime, anywhere, cross-platform and with just a few clicks. But we saw the potential for people to do much more than just post screenshots.
Not only should someone be able to post a circuit schematic into their question, someone else should be able to open that circuit, study it, tweak it, run simulations on it, and then post it as part of their solution. And when we saw that UX StackExchange and the Balsamiq mockups tool had completed a similar integration last year, we had a great model for bringing our communities together.
To see this collaboration in action, go to electronics.stackexchange.com. Post a new question, or open any existing question and scroll down to the answer section, and there should be a button on the toolbar to “Insert a Schematic”.
Clicking on this button will open up the CircuitLab editor inside an iframe overlay. The embedded editor has all the functionality of the main CircuitLab website. For example, if you happen to be a registered user of CircuitLab, you can even save the circuit into your personal workbench for later.
When you’re done, click “Save and Insert” to close the editor and insert the circuit schematic directly into your Stack Exchange post.
The circuit schematic is correctly cropped and appears with a link underneath to edit your design before you post. If you see an interesting circuit that someone else has posted, use that same link to view, edit and repost your own version.
We’d like to reach out to other sites where it might make sense to embed the CircuitLab editor. If you know of a website or forum that would benefit from having integrated circuit schematic capture and simulation, please let us know. And of course, if you haven’t already, register for a free account at CircuitLab!
The CircuitLab Team would like to thank Benjamin Dumke-von der Ehe and David Fullerton at Stack Exchange for all their time, patience and hard work in making this collaboration possible, and to the community of Electronics Stack Exchange who requested and championed an embedded schematic tool since before we even launched!
CircuitLab is an in-browser schematic capture and circuit simulation software tool to help you rapidly design and analyze analog and digital electronics systems.