Build Guide, Wiring List & BOM

Once a circuit is wired up on the desk, Chip Hippo can turn it into the paperwork you'd actually want on the bench: a bill of materials (what to buy, and how many), a human-addressed wiring list (what connects to what, in words a person can follow with a real breadboard in hand), and an ordered assembly checklist. None of this is stored on the document — it's derived fresh from the live desk every time you open or change it, so it never drifts out of sync with what you've actually built.

Opening the build guide

Click the Guide icon button in the toolbar (next to the schematic file actions) to open the build guide as a right-docked panel. Clicking it again, or the panel's own × close button, hides it. The panel's open/closed state is remembered between launches, same as the parts palette. It has three tabs — BOM, Wiring, and Steps — and is read-only, so it stays available even while a simulation is running.

The guide re-derives itself automatically whenever the document changes while it's open (adding/removing a part or wire, renaming a net, flipping a switch) — there's nothing to refresh by hand.

Warnings

Above whichever tab you're on, the guide surfaces anything that looks un-buildable or likely forgotten, with a count badge on the panel's title when there's something to see:

• Floating leads — a chip or discrete pin whose lead sits over no hole.
• Unpowered chips — a chip whose VCC or GND pin has no connection, so it will never power up.
• Single-member nets — a wired net that only reaches one point, which usually means a connection you meant to make and didn't.

The bill of materials

The BOM tab lists everything on the desk as counted line items, grouped into four sections (only the non-empty ones show): Breadboards, Chips, Discrete parts, and Power. Boards are counted by strip type (a Full 830 kit counts as its constituent rail/pin strips, not as one line), and components are counted by catalog identity — with a few splits that matter for actually buying the right part: LEDs split by color, PSU bricks by voltage, and clock sources by rate. Each line reads as title ×count.

The wiring list

The Wiring tab is net-centric, not wire-centric: instead of listing raw wire endpoints, it lists every electrically-interesting net and what's connected to it. A net only shows up here if you actually connected something to it — either it carries a wire, or it has two or more members — so a freshly-placed 14-pin chip with nothing wired to it doesn't spam the list with fourteen empty rows.

Each net's members are resolved to the friendliest label available, in this priority order:

1. A component pin at the hole — "74LS00 pin 3 (1Y)" (part + pin number + datasheet pin name, when the pin has one).
2. A pin sharing the hole's 5-hole node — a bus tap lands beside a pin rather than on it, and still resolves to that pin.
3. A PSU or clock terminal — "Power supply +".
4. A power rail — "+ rail (bb1)".
5. The bare hole address, as a last resort.

A net you've named (see Probing & Net Names) leads with that name instead of an anonymous net id, and buses group under a <bus name> bus heading with each row labeled by bit — so naming your nets up front, before opening the guide, makes this tab read far more like a real wiring diagram and far less like an address dump. See Wiring, Nets & Buses for how wires, colors, and buses work in the first place.

A net that only reaches one salient member is flagged with a small warning icon right in its row (and rolled into the warnings banner above).

Assembly steps

The Steps tab is an ordered checklist for building the circuit from scratch, grouped in the order you'd actually work: Place the boards, Power, Seat the chips, Add discrete parts, Run the signal wires. Each step has a checkbox — ticking it is a session-only visual aid (nothing is persisted), useful for tracking progress while you build.

A few notable details in how steps are phrased:

• A grouped breadboard kit (rails + pin strip snapped together) is one step, not one per strip; a loose strip gets its own step.
• Power steps cover PSU/clock bricks (set to their configured voltage/rate) and then any wire that distributes power — a brick terminal or rail hole at either end.
• A chip's step spells out its straddle, e.g. "straddling e5–f11, pin 1 at bb1.e5" (plus a flipped note if it's rotated 180°); a linear discrete lists its resolved lead addresses instead.
• Signal wires are grouped last: whole buses first (one step per bus, one detail line per bit), then the remaining signal nets, each with its wires listed as from → to using the same friendly local labels as the wiring list.

Downloading the BOM

The download icon in the panel header exports the whole current plan — BOM, wiring list, and assembly steps together, headings and all — as a Rich Text Format (.rtf) document, named <schematic name>-bom.rtf after your current schematic file. It's a plain browser download (no save dialog, no main-process IPC involved) generated entirely in the renderer, so it reflects exactly what the panel is showing at the moment you click it. .rtf opens in any word processor, which makes it easy to print or hand off as a build sheet alongside the physical parts.