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Show HN: Describe a Circuit in English, Get a Schematic and Explanation
Hi HN! I built a small tool that lets you describe simple circuits in plain English and get a schematic. You can then ask follow up questions like "whats the voltage drop across R1?" or "How would you calculate the Thevenin equivalent resistance?"
Emphasis on simple—right now it handles very basic circuits (think: 1 voltage source, a few resistors, maybe a cap).
I built it because I am a mechanical engineer by training and sometimes forget basic EE. LLM's are making it so quick and easy to understand codebases, I thought it would be cool to try and build the same for circuits.
It's a prototype for now, but I think it could eventually be really useful for autodidacts, students, and engineers looking to brush up their circuit theory.
Would love feedback on whether others think this might be useful. Link: https://circuit-tutor.xyz/ https://circuit-tutor.xyz/
- baxdev 2y agoWhat do you think about trying this with CircuitJS?
- andrewrn 2y agoYeah I’ve seen that. Longer term I’d love to add similar simulation. So it’d be like CircuitJS but with an LLM so you can ask questions. CircuitJS uses canvas though and I use svg, so it will require some thought. Is that something that you think would be useful?
- baxdev 2y agoI think this will be useful but not an important feature. I also prefer using svg over canvas. Since svg doesn't work well with animations without JS, I think it's not ideal for that. Last year, I needed example circuits for a quiz app, so I chose CircuitJS because it can be embedded in a webview and supports importing and exporting circuits as text. Initially, AI (Gemini 1.5 Pro 001) had trouble generating the circuit text, but after I provided some example descriptions and scripts I created on Falstad.com, it started getting it right. However, It couldn't generate complex circuits. I never got around to testing its output this year. Maybe AI has improved a lot since then. I had considered training(fine tuning) an LLM for this task, but I don't think that's the best approach. perhaps latest AI can now generate circuits more reliably with a simpler system prompt. edit: latest AI can also generate CircuitTikZ (LaTeX). I tested image to circuittikz on Google ai studio, and Gemini 2.5 pro Experimental 03-25 generated it in just two attempts. The results were pretty impressive.
- andrewrn 2y agoThis is super useful info. Image-to-circuit sounds really useful, and I don’t know current models were already capable. I think I’m going to move on from this project for now, not getting much interest, haha. Thanks for the input.