Wiring

Drag between pins and holes, recolour, bend, name a net, and hide a family in the layers panel.

Drawing a wire

Drag from any pin or any breadboard hole to any other. While you drag, the pin or hole under the pointer gets a ring and its own name beside it, so you can see what you are about to land on before you let go. Press Escape part way through to abandon the wire.

A breadboard is not wired: it is connected. Five holes in a strip are one net, the rails run the length of each side, and the center channel is 0.3 inch wide, which is exactly what a DIP chip straddles. Push two pins into the same strip and they are joined with no wire at all.

How a route is drawn

Wires are routed rather than drawn as straight lines, by five rules:

1. A wire leaves a pin square to the part's edge, and comes into the far pin square to that one, for at least a whole grid unit.
2. Parallel runs sit two grid units apart, so a group of wires leaving one row reads as a harness with an even pitch and you can see between them.
3. A run that has to change both x and y turns once. Out, turn, in.
4. Every corner lands on the grid.
5. Two runs never share a line. A wire whose lane is taken takes the next one out.

Corners are drawn with a small radius, so it reads as a bent jumper and not as a circuit-board trace. Drag a corner afterwards and the run follows it.

A run also keeps a clear unit off a power rail's holes, since those are what you count to find where something is plugged in.

Once a circuit has been dragged about for a while the wires stop obeying these rules, because you have moved their ends. T, or Tidy wires, lays them out again.

Color

The moment a wire is finished, a row of eight color swatches pops up beside its end. One click recolours it; anything else on the canvas puts the row away and the wire keeps the color it was drawn with. You can also change a wire's color later from the properties panel.

Color is for you, not for the simulator. A red wire and a gray one behave identically.

Naming a net

Select a wire and give it a label from the properties panel, or double click the wire. The name is drawn along the wire, and it belongs to the net, not to that piece of wire: name one jumper SDA and every wire on the same net shows SDA, because electrically they are the same thing.

The name survives editing. Adding parts, moving them, drawing more wires onto the same net: the label stays. It is only lost when the pin or hole it was pinned to goes away.

Labels are also what the serial and probe readouts use, and the part panel's search finds them.

The layers panel

Press L, or pick Layers from the canvas toolbar's more menu. It lists eight fixed rows (Breadboard, Boards, Parts, Wires, Labels, Notes, Drawings, Probes) plus one row for every wire color actually in use, so a whole signal family hides as one. Each row can be shown or hidden, dimmed, or locked; a locked row cannot be selected or dragged on the canvas.

This is how you are looking at the project, not part of the project. It is kept in this browser against the project's id and never goes into the diagram, an export or a share link. Hiding a wire hides the drawing of it: the netlist comes from the diagram, so a hidden wire still carries current.

If a wire refuses to attach, a wire will not connect has the reasons.