Opening the panel
Press the round + button on the canvas toolbar, or the A key. The panel docks down the left-hand side of the canvas on a desktop and comes up as a bottom sheet on a phone. It is the same panel either way.
The search field takes the focus as the panel opens, so you can open it and start typing without touching anything.
Finding a part
Search looks at four things: the part's plain name, its type string, its
one-line description and a list of extra words filed against it. So pot,
knob, dial and volume all find the potentiometer, and light, lamp and
blink all find the LED. If nothing matches outright the search falls back to a
looser match rather than showing you an empty panel.
Search also finds a wire you have named. Type a net label and the panel offers it above the tiles; picking it takes you to that wire on the canvas. See wiring for how to name a net.
The categories
Beside the search field is a rail of ten categories, and every part in the catalog is filed under exactly one of them:
- Basics: LED, resistor, capacitor, clock, lamp
- Boards: ESP32-C3, Arduino Uno, Nano, Mega, ESP32, Raspberry Pi Pico and the rest
- Inputs: pushbuttons, switches, joysticks, keypads, potentiometers
- Sensors: light, temperature, distance, motion and many more
- Outputs: buzzers, NeoPixels, RGB LEDs, servos, motors, relays
- Displays: seven-segment, TM1637, SSD1306 OLED, ILI9341 TFT, MAX7219, character LCDs
- Logic: ideal gates, flip-flops, bit switches and lamps, 74HC and CD4000 chips
- Timers and analog: the 555, op-amps, transistors, diodes, signal generator, scope
- Clocks and links: real-time clocks, a PWM driver, Bluetooth, RS-485, GSM, IR, MP3 player, RFID and NFC, microSD, GPS, radio modules, I2C multiplexer
- Power and wiring: VCC, GND, batteries, regulators, converters, breadboard, half breadboard
There is more about what each family does in the part families.
Tiles that are not parts
At the top of the panel, under a Notes heading, are two tiles that are not
parts: Sticky note, a square of paper you can write on, and Frame, a
labeled box around a corner of the board. Neither has pins, is wired, or is
seen by the simulation. Searching for note or frame finds them. See
sticky notes and frames.
Under them, when you have any, are your saved Blocks and the Chips in this project. See reusable blocks and chips made from parts.
Getting it onto the canvas
Three ways, and they all end with the same part:
- Click a tile. The part lands in the middle of the current view.
- Drag a tile onto the canvas. A ghost follows the pointer and the part lands where you let go. A finger does this as well as a mouse does.
- Use the keyboard. The arrows move through the tiles and Enter places the highlighted one. Escape closes the panel.
A Recent row at the top holds the last eight parts you placed, because most circuits use the same handful over and over.
Once it is down
Drag a part to move it. Press R to rotate the selected parts by 90 degrees, and Delete to remove them along with any wire that was attached. Drop a part onto a breadboard so its pins land in holes and the strips do the wiring for you.
Moving a breadboard
A breadboard takes what is plugged into it along, the way a real one does. Drag it, or nudge it with the arrow keys, and every part with at least one pin in one of its holes moves with it, with the wires between those parts. A part that only lies on top of the board, with no pin in a hole, stays where it is, and so does anything on a layer you locked in the Layers panel.
To move the board on its own and leave its parts behind, hold Alt (Option on a Mac) while you drag it. Hover over the edge of a board with parts in it and a tooltip says the same.
The whole move is one step of Undo, and in a live room everyone sees the board and its parts move together.
A part somebody has locked does none of that: it will not move, rotate or delete, its cursor is a no-drop, and it wears a small padlock. The lock holds the people you hand the circuit to, such as the students in your class, and not you: on your own circuit a locked part still moves for you. You can still wire into its pins, add parts around it and run the circuit. That is what a locked starter circuit is for. See assignments and submissions.
Every tile's drawing is the real part, drawn from the same code the canvas uses, so what you pick is what you get.