Finding a part

The bench, a part page, and the search box in the editor panel.

The bench

/parts is every part in the catalog, each drawn live rather than photographed, with one line saying what it does. The order is what you reach for first, first: breadboard, wire, power, LED, resistor, then the boards, then everything else.

On a phone the bench comes eight at a time behind a Show more that says how many are left, because sixty-seven live drawings in one column is a page nobody scrolls to the end of.

The list is generated from the catalog itself. A part that lands in the engine appears here on the next build, with the same name it has in the editor.

A part's own page

Click a tile and you get /parts/<type>: the drawing, its pin count and pin names, one line of what it does, and, for the parts people search for most, a paragraph called What it does that goes into the behavior properly. The LED one explains why it needs a series resistor; the pushbutton one explains contact bounce; the 74HC595 one explains why there are two registers inside it.

Under that is See the <part> in a project: every built-in project whose circuit actually places that part, each card opening in the editor. That row is computed from the projects rather than written by hand, so it can never point at a project that no longer uses the part.

In the editor

The part panel's search box is usually faster than going to the site. It looks at the part's name, its type string, its one-line description, and a list of extra words filed against it: pot, knob, dial and volume all find the potentiometer.

There is a category rail beside it for browsing rather than searching. See placing parts and the part families.

The glossary

/glossary is the other way in: fifty-one terms, plainly defined, for when you know what you want the circuit to do but not what the thing is called.

What a part page will not tell you

How faithfully the part behaves. That is the same answer for every part and it has its own page: how faithfully a part behaves.