schematic_gui is a lightweight tool to draw circuit diagrams of digital designs. It was written because I was not satisfied with the tools I typically use to draw schematic diagrams for documentation purposes. It may eventually be useful for design as well, but since I typically design my circuits using HDL language this is not a primary development goal as yet.
- Optimized for quick schematic entry. Wires will always snap to the closest connector or wire (depending on if the middle or right mouse button is used), regardless of distance.
- Automatic routing of wires (with support for manual override)
- Automatically saves the design to $HOME/.schematic_gui/ in timestamped files. If the program crashes (which it probably will at some point), chances are that you can find a previous version of the design in this directory.
- It works for me (if you ignore the occasional crash and memory leak)
- Ugly source code (which is being cleaned up though)
- Save file format is (more or less) Verilog compatible. (The eventual goal is that a file saved with schematic_gui should be synthesizable, but that is not quite possible yet.)
- Exports to SVG file format
- Exports current view to clipboard
See the tutorial for more information.
This is a screenshot when opening the simple_alu.v file in the examples directory.
- Small circle: Closest connector port, press middle button to connect a wire here.
- Larger circle: Closest point on a wire, press right mouse button to connect a wire here.
- Crossmark: Checkpoint, routing has been manually overridden here in order to look better.
- In addition, the component closest to the mouse cursor (the adder) is also highlighted. Whenever the left mouse button is pressed the highlighted component will be moved (regardless of how close the mouse cursor is).
- Copyright (C) 2015 Andreas Ehliar andreas.ehliar@liu.se
- GPLv3 or later.
- Exception: The Verilog modules distributed with the program (all files ending in .v) are licensed as CC0 (public domain)
- Clarification: Files saved or exported from schematic_gui are not covered by any schematic_gui license.
- libavoid (from the adaptagrams framework)
- gtk3
Note that all of these operations are subject to change based on feedback from users.
- Left mouse button: To move the highlighted component or checkpoint, press the left mouse button once to enable move mode, press the left mouse button once again when you have moved it.
- Middle mouse button: Connect a wire to a highlighted port
- Right mouse button: To connect a wire you are drawing to the highlighted location on another wire, press right mouse button. Alternatively, start drawing a wire at the highlighted location. (Avoid cyclic graphs, they are not fully supported at this time.)
- Scroll wheel: Zoom in/out
- Arrow keys: Scroll left,right,up,down
- d: Deletes the closest wire (alternatively, abort wire drawing if you are currently in wire drawing mode (i.e. you have pressed the left or right mouse button once)
- D: Deletes the highlighted component or checkpoint (including any wires connected to it)
- A: Select all objects
- c: Adds a checkpoint to the highlighted line. (You can use this to manually control routing to some extent.)
- r: Rotate the highlighted component
- i: Toggle inversion on the highlighted port
- e: Edits the name of the highlighted wire
- E: Edits the name of the highlighted component or text field
- t: Adds a new text field
- T: Adds a new text field and connects it to the highlighted port
- s: Adds a component to the current selection
- S: Unselects all components
- p: Print preview (disables all highlighted components, checkpoints, etc)
- Ctrl-s: Saves the current design (hint, save often and using different filenames, this program is not really stable yet)
These components are added to the schematic by pressing the corresponding key.
- 1: Create an adder
- 2: Create 2 input multiplexer
- 3: Create 3 input multiplexer
- 4: Create 4 input multiplexer
- 5: Create 5 input multiplexer
- 6: Create 6 input multiplexer
- 7: Create a register
- 8: Create a multiplier
- 9: Create a small black box component
- 0: Create a large black box component
- Fix all memory leaks
- Make sure the design files that are saved are actually correct Verilog code
- Right now they are almost correct, but some work is required to actually be able to compile these files. Most notably there are no input and outputs.
- User should be able to set the name of the module
- Make sure the user can set the width of wires
- (Make sure the user can propagate the width of the wires in a clever fashion.
- Add support for more Verilog primitives to allow schematic_gui to be used to document existing Verilog files.
- Create VPI code to render the design even if schematic_gui is not used.
- Integration with verilog-mode in emacs (perhaps using Joakim Verona's xwidgets patch for emacs)
- Better documentation
- Code cleanups (Right now the code doesn't even pretend to follow any decent design patterns for GUI:s such as MVC.)
- Junctions in libavoid are acting up. A workaround is included in clean_junction_positions(). This should be investigated more and if possible the workaround should be removed.
- Export to other formats than SVG
- Export current view to clipboard
- Allow component symbols to be specified using SVG (perhaps using librsvg to read these symbols?)
- Add a better way to add components
- Add a way to cycle through similar components without deleting all connected wires
- At the moment only acyclic graphs are allowed for wires in the design. There are, however, no checks that prohibit their creation in the GUI. (But they can't be saved correctly in some situations. This should probably be fixed (either by disallowing their creation or by allowing them to be saved as well).
- The undo functionality is very experimental at this point and saves a little too much information in the undo stack.
- Add a way to include optional wires in symbols. (E.g., if something is connected to this port the line will be included, otherwise it will be omitted.)
- Try to move some libavoid-related functionality into libavoid itself (e.g. find closest connector, etc)
- Move to an autoconf based configuration?
- Script to automatically download/compile libavoid if not detected by configure?
- Add status bar to make it easier for users to see what is going on.
- Better error checking. (For example when opening files that either cannot be read or that cannot be parsed.)