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Drawing digital circuits can become a mess very fast which makes testing those even more difficult. Doing it offline is a painful job with all those wires. So, what GUI software is recommended for building digital circuits and testing them?

Lekensteyn
  • 174,277

3 Answers3

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2022 Update

The original Logisim is currently unmaintained, however Logisim Evolution is now the successor, and still open source and maintained at https://github.com/logisim-evolution/logisim-evolution. It has support for Linux (Deb and RPM), Mac and Windows. It is still purely digital, and easy to run.

Old answer

Logisim is not in the repos, but being a single java jar, should be fairly easy to get going. It is purely digital, without the discrete and analogue components. It is however quite sophisticated - I've been putting together a simulation of a single instruction CPU with it.

Instructions for getting and running it:

  1. Download the .jar file from http://sourceforge.net/projects/circuit/

  2. If you saved the file to ~/apps/logisim-generic-2.7.1.jar, you can run it from a terminal with:

     java -jar ~/apps/logisim-generic-2.7.1.jar

  3. To save yourself from typing that the whole time, create the executable ~/bin/logisim containing

     #!/bin/sh
 java -jar ~/apps/logisim-generic-2.7.1.jar

  4. Make it executable:

     chmod +x ~/bin/logisim

  5. If ~/bin existed before, it's already in your $PATH. Otherwise, re-login to update your $PATH. From now on, you can start it by running:

     logisim

If you update logisim later, it's as easy as putting the new file in ~/apps/ and change the filename in ~/bin/logisim

Well, now it's there in the ubuntu 14.04 repositories as well, just type :-

   sudo apt-get install logisim

to install it.

Danny Staple
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I used a promising program called KTechLab in the past, the program is KDE 3 based and has not yet been ported to KDE 4 I used it to teach some youngsters electronics both analogue and digital concepts, it is a fine piece of software, even has PIC microcontroller simulation, sadly development seem to be very very slow and after they made an update to it I started having stability problems, I would still encourage you to try it though.

It is in the repositories but I do not know if the stability problems are still there as I have stopped using it.

The links below may be of some use:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ktechlab/

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/computer-logic-design-ktechlab

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KTechLab

Sabacon
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  • It's neither in the natty nor oneiric repos. It looks quite extended, is it easy to use? – Lekensteyn Sep 23 '11 at 19:14
  • It is extremely easy to use, see the manual at Wikipedia, you may be able to install by the download from the sourceforge link. sorry I am still using 10.10 – Sabacon Sep 23 '11 at 21:13
  • I'll give it a go even if the tarball is from November 2009. The git repos are more recent, but I'm not sure which one is the most stable so'll stick to the tarball for now. – Lekensteyn Sep 23 '11 at 21:22
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You should have had a quick look at the Software Centre, it's always where I look first if I'm trying to find something. I typed in "circuit" and you get a nice list of the follow: KLogic, tkgate & Qucs (the rest just seem to be for making/design PCB's and other stuff). The tkgate one was always my favourite one to use. I suggest giving that a go, along with KLogic, and see how you feel about them.

hazrpg
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  • I actually looked at every available software package, but they all seems to be outdated (2009/2010) or not what I'm looking for (not a plain drawing tool, but something that also allows for simulation). tkgate looks like I've to learn Tcl first. Is that true? – Lekensteyn Sep 23 '11 at 20:20
  • Not actually sure if you need to learn Tcl first... but might be useful. Did you eventually find something that works for you btw? – hazrpg Jan 30 '12 at 13:49
  • Logism was the niciest tool I encountered. – Lekensteyn Jan 30 '12 at 14:28