We are excited to announce that CircuitLab is now integrated with the Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange site! Users can now insert a CircuitLab schematic directly into their question or answer.

If you’re unfamiliar with Stack Exchange, they host a network of community-moderated question & answer sites covering any number of topics, from databases to gaming to home improvement. The main site in their network is StackOverflow, which deals mostly with computer programming. Electronics Stack Exchange focuses specifically on electronic design, which is a perfect fit for CircuitLab!

Why We Did It

Before this integration, we were already noticing people posting screenshots from CircuitLab as part of their question on Electronics Stack Exchange. This was cool, and it was aligned with our mission of allowing people to sketch, simulate and share their circuits anytime, anywhere, cross-platform and with just a few clicks. But we saw the potential for people to do much more than just post screenshots.

Not only should someone be able to post a circuit schematic into their question, someone else should be able to open that circuit, study it, tweak it, run simulations on it, and then post it as part of their solution. And when we saw that UX StackExchange and the Balsamiq mockups tool had completed a similar integration last year, we had a great model for bringing our communities together.

How to Use It

To see this collaboration in action, go to electronics.stackexchange.com. Post a new question, or open any existing question and scroll down to the answer section, and there should be a button on the toolbar to “Insert a Schematic”.

Clicking on this button will open up the CircuitLab editor inside an iframe overlay. The embedded editor has all the functionality of the main CircuitLab website. For example, if you happen to be a registered user of CircuitLab, you can even save the circuit into your personal workbench for later.

When you’re done, click “Save and Insert” to close the editor and insert the circuit schematic directly into your Stack Exchange post.

The circuit schematic is correctly cropped and appears with a link underneath to edit your design before you post. If you see an interesting circuit that someone else has posted, use that same link to view, edit and repost your own version.

What’s Next?

We’d like to reach out to other sites where it might make sense to embed the CircuitLab editor. If you know of a website or forum that would benefit from having integrated circuit schematic capture and simulation, please let us know. And of course, if you haven’t already, register for a free account at CircuitLab!

The CircuitLab Team would like to thank Benjamin Dumke-von der Ehe and David Fullerton at Stack Exchange for all their time, patience and hard work in making this collaboration possible, and to the community of Electronics Stack Exchange who requested and championed an embedded schematic tool since before we even launched!