Build Guide & 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 — down to a numbered cutting list of every jumper), and an ordered assembly checklist that names each of those jumpers as you come to run it. 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 Bill Of Materials clipboard button at the right-hand end of the desk-tools pill, or press Ctrl+B / ⌘B, to open the build guide as a right-docked panel. Clicking it again, or the panel's own × close button, hides it — and the button stays lit for as long as the panel is open, however you opened or closed it. The panel's open/closed state is remembered between launches, same as the parts palette. It has two tabs — BOM 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 five sections (only the non-empty ones show): Breadboards, Chips, Discrete parts, Power, and Wires. 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 cutting list

Wires comes last, because you wire after you seat, and it's a different kind of list: a numbered cutting list, one line per colour and cut length, tallied.

[3] Jumper wire (red, 6.1 cm)  ×3

That's three leads to cut the same, which is how you'd actually work through a drawer or a spool — so the length belongs in the line rather than beside it. The length is the cut length: the run from hole to hole plus the stripped end that goes down into each hole, so a jumper crossing a single 0.1 in pitch is about 13 mm of wire, not 3. It's the same measurement, and the same wording, as the drawing at the bottom of a wire's own Properties… dialog (see Wiring, Nets & Buses) — a wire can't read one length there and another here.

Lines are sorted by the app's colour order, then shortest first, and numbered in that order. The number is a cross-reference: every assembly step that runs a wire calls it out as [3], so you cut the pile once, number it, and never have to re-measure anything mid-build. It only moves if the desk itself changes — never because a colour was renamed or the language switched.

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 [n] from → to. The leading [n] is that wire's item number from the cutting list above, so the callouts form a column you can read down while you cut.

How an endpoint is named

A wire's two ends are resolved to the friendliest label available rather than printed as raw addresses, 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 its step with that name instead of an anonymous net id, so naming your nets up front, before opening the guide, makes the whole tab read far more like a real assembly sheet and far less like an address dump.

Downloading the BOM

The download icon in the panel header exports the whole current plan — the BOM and the assembly steps together, headings, item numbers and all — as a Rich Text Format (.rtf) document, named <project name>-bom.rtf. It mirrors the panel's tabs, so what you get on paper is what you were looking at. 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.