Forums » CircuitLab Feature Requests

I am really enjoying playing around with the software. However, it's not really a good platform for anything other than simple school lab projects for a few reasons, hopefully which could be fixed. And here are my suggestions!

For design purposes:

• The design and capture aspect is great, but when I want to turn this into my senior design project (i.e. build an actual PCB) I don't have any options other than completely rebuilding the schematic in another program. If I have to learn and build the schematic in that other program anyway, why am I going to use CircuitLab and build it twice? It would be nice to offer some export capability to common formats (for gEDA tools, Eagle, etc). Maybe this feature exists in the hobbyist or engineer version, but it's important for students as well who need to realize a design to graduate, assuming their senior design consists of more than a few components shoved on a breadboard (which they usually do).
• Having a board layout design tool would be a great addition as well, but in the meantime the suggestion above would suffice.
• In the same vein, outputting a BOM would be fantastic. You could perhaps even profit a bit by adding all the components I need to my Jameco or Digikey shopping cart. ;-)
• It would be nice to be able to build custom components and link them in other schematics. For example, maybe I designed a current sense circuit which I'd like to reuse across different projects (perhaps even multiple times in the same project) but I don't want to rebuild the thing multiple times. That's just silly. Or maybe I make a boost-buck converter, a three phase rectifier, an I2C to UART converter, whatever. It'd be nice to be able to reuse those in new schematics as components. Or even if I just want to break up my large schematic into more manageable chunks (like if I'm a masochist who want's to build an op-amp using transistors).

Those are the major issues. As it stands, the ease of use aspect, while great, isn't really useful if I can't make a final project with it. Right now I still have use another tool to redo the schematic capture to build my project.

The next requests are lower priority but would still make for a better product I believe.

Usability:

• Shortcuts are great, but it'd be great if you could edit them and add new ones that don't exists. Engineers are lazy. I don't want to have to take my hand off the mouse to reach the "delete" key to delete a component. I'd rather set the shortcut to the D key (my left hand is there anyway). A left handed user would probably have something completely different to say about that and all the defaults. I'd also like a key to toggle between build/simulate, as well as some shortcuts to plop in common components like R's, C's, and and diodes.
• In wire mode, it'd be nice not to have to drag and drop wires. Instead, if I just click and release, maybe allow a feature to lock it in wire mode until the next click (my endpoint). If I'm making some edits to my circuit on a laptop with a trackpad, precisely dragging and dropping can be a bit cumbersome.
• It'd be great if the Export Plot CSV option let me download a CSV instead of copying and pasting it into a new file.
• Having an easy way to output/print a schematic to a standard engineering draft paper size with a frame and schematic information would be useful. Something like this (https://cdn.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Dev/Arduino/Boards/Arduino-Pro-Mini-v14.pdf) is common, allowing me to list one or more schematics with some information at the bottom.

Forums:

• Nothing to do with the software, but it might be a good idea to configure the forums to allow up/down voting of requests. It would give you a good idea of which are the most highly requested features or problems.

I hope this is helpful!