Chip Hippo is a desktop playground for TTL circuits. Drop 74-series chips onto an infinite breadboard, wire them up, hit Run — and watch electricity ripple through every net until it settles. LEDs light, counters count, shorts smoke. All offline.
macOS · Windows · Linux · Free & open source
Features
Everything you need to design a 74xx circuit, prove it out, and take it to a real breadboard — fast, keyboard-friendly, and fully offline.
An endlessly pannable, zoomable workspace. Drop Full 830, Half 400, and Tiny 170 boards — power rails and pin-boards snap together like the real thing.
Gates, flip-flops, counters, decoders, muxes, shift registers, comparators, and bus drivers — a data-driven catalog with datasheet-exact pinouts. Add a chip; it's just data.
Trace power from the supplies, resolve every electrical net, compute each chip's outputs, and ripple changes until the circuit settles. LEDs glow, switches act live.
Edge-triggered flip-flops, counters, and shift registers step correctly on every clock. A clock source drives the bench with Run / Pause / Single-step and speed control.
Address-indexed ROM, SRAM, and EEPROM on wide DIP packages. Drive the address bus and the stored byte appears on the data pins; write it back on a /WE pulse.
Slide switches, momentary push buttons, four-colour polarised LEDs, and 3 V / 5 V / 12 V supplies with addressable terminals. Wrong voltage? Watch a chip release its magic smoke.
Hover any hole to highlight its entire electrical net across every board and wire, with a live readout of what's connected and the level it's carrying.
Wire a whole address or data bus in a single gesture instead of one lead at a time — the bus tool tracks matching pin groups across chips and keeps the routing tidy.
Flip from the physical breadboard to a clean logical schematic — each part drawn as its symbol, nets auto-routed — so you can read the design the way an engineer would.
Turn a finished design into artifacts you can follow at a real bench: named nets, a step-by-step build guide, and a wiring list to place every chip and route every jumper.
Double-click any part for a floating pin-assignment window — the physical DIP diagram plus the manufacturer's connection diagram and function table, right on the desk.
No account, no telemetry, no cloud. Everything runs locally and your designs are plain files you own. Apache-2.0 licensed and fully auditable on GitHub.
Downloads
Version 0.1.0 — free to download and use. No account required.
Pre-release builds are currently unsigned. On macOS, right-click the app and choose Open to bypass Gatekeeper the first time; on Windows, choose More info → Run anyway at the SmartScreen prompt. See the code-signing policy for how to verify a build, or build from source.
Recent releases