Settings

Chip Hippo keeps its handful of app-wide preferences in one small Settings dialog — a tabbed master-detail card with a left nav rail and a panel on the right. It's deliberately minimal: five tabs, a few controls each, applied live the moment you change them.

Opening Settings

Open the dialog with Cmd/Ctrl+,, or click the gear icon in the top-right corner of the header. Both routes lead to the same dialog seeded with your current settings, so it doesn't matter which you use.

Several settings carry a small ⓘ beside their label. Click it for a note explaining what the setting does and what it doesn't touch; Esc, a click anywhere outside the note, or the ⓘ again closes it. The first Esc closes the note and the next one closes Settings, so you never lose the dialog by dismissing a note.

Appearance

The Appearance tab is the one the dialog opens on:

• Language — the language Chip Hippo's own menus, panels, dialogs and tooltips are shown in: System, English, Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, 日本語 or 中文（简体）. System follows your operating system's own language, falling back to English if Chip Hippo doesn't ship that one. Every language names itself in its own words rather than in the one you're currently reading, so the list stays usable if you land on one you can't. The change applies immediately and everywhere — the menu bar and every open window included, with no restart and nothing reloaded, so an unsaved design is never at risk. This user guide is only available in English.
• Editor font size — how big Chip Hippo's own text is drawn, in pixels: 11, 12, 13, 14, 16 or 18, default 13. It applies to every window at once, including the floating pinout, memory inspector and user-guide windows, and to the boxes around the text — buttons and panels grow with it rather than clipping it. Cmd+= and Cmd+- step through the sizes from the keyboard and Cmd+0 restores the default. What it does not change is the desk itself: chip labels, board addressing and your own annotations are printed on the circuit and drawn to the breadboard's scale, so they grow with the desk zoom (Option+Cmd+=) instead.
• Theme — System, Light or Dark. System follows your operating system's own setting; the other two pin it. The choice applies to every Chip Hippo window at once, including the floating pinout, memory inspector and user-guide windows, and to the native menus and dialogs.
• Selection border colour — a #rrggbb colour picker for the outline drawn around whatever's selected on the desk. Leave it unset to use the theme's default accent colour instead of a custom one.
• Default LED color — which colour a newly placed LED, LED bar or seven-segment digit gets. Unlike the others this one isn't applied live; it's read when you place a part, so changing it doesn't recolour anything already on the desk. Any placed part's colour can still be changed from its Properties… dialog.
• Wire layout — Direct (the default) or Routed, the layout method a newly laid wire gets. Direct wires sag from hole to hole; routed wires run straight and can be bent around obstacles by dragging points into them (see Wiring). Like the LED colour it's read when you lay a wire, so wires already on the desk keep the layout they have — change one from its own Properties… dialog.
• Auto-close tray folders — On or Off (the default). When it's on, opening a folder in the parts tray closes every other one, so only the section you're working in stays open, along with the folder it sits inside. Clicking an icon on the shut tray's strip does the same. It acts on the next folder you open, so switching it on doesn't close anything by itself.
• 3D enabled — On or Off (the default). When it's on, the toolbar shows the 3D button that switches to the 3D view; off hides the button, and if the 3D view is showing at the time, Chip Hippo goes back to the breadboard.

Everything but the LED colour and the wire layout takes effect immediately — there's no separate Apply or OK step. (Changing the language is the one setting that closes and reopens this dialog, so the card you're looking at comes back in the language you just picked, on the tab you were reading.)

Serial I/O

The Serial I/O tab holds the connections — the named Arduino boards that Outputs and Inputs talk to. A dropdown at the top picks one, and the settings under it are that connection's. The list always starts with the built-in Mock, a pretend board with nothing to configure (see The Mock connection); its Open window… shows what it receives and lets you send values back. + beside the list adds a connection, and the bin removes the one picked — click it twice (the first click turns it into a ?; clicking anywhere else, or Esc, puts it back). The ⓘ says what connections are for.

Each connection has a Name, the Port it is plugged into (Re-scan looks again after you plug a board in), a Baud rate, the Language Generate writes the board's code in — C++ (the default, an Arduino header) or Python (a module for MicroPython and CircuitPython boards; see Python boards) — and under Advanced the rest of the serial framing (parity, stop bits, flow control — data bits are always 8, and flow control is None or Hardware, since the link is binary). Unlike the other tabs, nothing here applies until you press Apply, which also checks the port is present — if it isn't, you're told so and the button becomes Apply anyway. You can edit several connections before applying: each keeps its changes while you look at another, and one with changes not yet applied is marked • in the list. Open window… opens the connection's window. The book icon beside the card's close button (shown on this tab only) opens the Serial Protocol reference in the user guide.

A connection the circuit can't run with yet says why in the list — Port unavailable, or Needs configuration when it arrived in a project from another computer (a project carries its connections' names and settings, but never a port) — and its Port is marked in red. See Connections for the details.

Spice Lite

The Spice Lite tab switches on the more electrical simulation (see Spice Lite). Spice Lite turns it On or Off, from the next Run. Settle gap is how close a voltage that no input is watching gets to its final value before the probe stops redrawing it (1 % by default). Switch bounce makes a switch's contacts bounce for a few milliseconds as they close, as a real one's do (Off by default; see Switch bounce). A TTL | CMOS strip shows the families the parts palette shows (and any family the open project uses). Under each are its datasheet source, a Reset to defaults button, and an Advanced section holding every number Spice Lite uses for that family. A value that won't read turns red and keeps the old one. Every change, the numbers included, applies from the next Run, and to every project on this computer.

Data Sheets

Chip family leads the tab: which logic family the parts palette shows — 74LS (the TTL chips, the default), CD4000 (the CMOS chips), or Both, each in a folder of its own. It applies at once, and it only filters the palette: a project's chips always load and run whatever is chosen here, and a family the open project uses is shown anyway. See Choosing a logic family.

Below it, the tab points Chip Hippo at an external folder of manufacturer datasheet PDFs on your machine. Click Browse… to pick a folder with the native file picker; the chosen path is shown next to it, with a Clear button that resets it to no folder selected.

Name the PDFs in that folder after each chip's catalog reference (for example 74LS00.pdf). When a chip's file is found there, its pin-assignments window grows a button that opens the PDF in your system's default viewer. This is separate from the small datasheet crop the pinout window already shows for most chips — the external folder is for the full manufacturer document, not the built-in crop.

If you don't already have a collection, Download… fetches one for you. It pulls a datasheet for every part Chip Hippo has a published source on file for, names each file after the part it belongs to, and points the setting above at that folder when it's done — so the buttons appear with nothing else to set up. A progress window counts the files in and names anything that couldn't be fetched; closing it stops the download and keeps whatever already arrived. The sources are:

• Texas Instruments — the current manufacturer's own documents for much of the 74LS family, and for every CD4000 part (several of which share one sheet — it is fetched once and saved under each part's name);
• Microchip — the Atmel EEPROM parts;
• Alliance Memory — the large SRAM;
• the Western Design Center — likewise for the 65xx parts;
• Zilog — the Z80 family user manual;
• the USC EE 459Lx reference library — vendor scans of the older 74LS parts, collected for a university course, plus the HD44780, the memory parts and the DIP resistor/oscillator packages;
• a datasheet archive, for the one part whose maker no longer publishes it.

Expect a few tens of megabytes in total; the modern manufacturer PDFs are much larger than the old scans.

Between them they don't carry every part in the catalog, so some chips will still have no PDF button. Press Download… again whenever you like — it replaces what it fetched last time. It always writes to Chip Hippo's own folder and never to one you picked yourself, so a collection of your own is never overwritten: Browse… and Download… are simply two ways of setting the same folder, and whichever you did last is the one in effect.

AI

The AI tab is where you point Chip Hippo at your own AI connection, for the AI circuit builder. Nothing here is required — the app works completely without it, and contacts no AI provider until a connection is configured and you ask the builder for something. (The only other times Chip Hippo reaches the network at all are the datasheet Download… button above, while you're pressing it, and the update check on the About tab below, which is switched off until you turn it on.)

• Provider — Anthropic, or OpenAI-compatible. The second covers Ollama, LM Studio, OpenRouter, vLLM and anything else speaking that request format; you supply the base URL.
• Base URL and Model — leave either blank to use the chosen provider's default, which is shown as the field's placeholder. Both commit when you leave the field or press Enter, not as you type.
• API key — paste it and click Save key. Clear key forgets it. A local server that needs no key works with this left blank.
• Test connection — one small request that checks the base URL, key and model together, so a typo is found here rather than on your first build.

The key is never written to Chip Hippo's settings file. It's handed to your operating system's own secure credential store — Keychain on macOS, the Credential Manager on Windows, the desktop keyring on Linux — encrypted, and it's never read back into the app's window afterwards; the dialog only learns whether a key is stored. If no secure store is available on your system, Chip Hippo refuses to save the key and says so rather than quietly writing it out in the clear.

About

The About tab shows which version of Chip Hippo you're running, and is where updates are handled.

• Check automatically — On or Off, and Off is the default. On, Chip Hippo asks GitHub once, shortly after launch, whether there's a newer release. Off, it never asks on its own — but the button below still works whenever you want to know.
• Check for updates — checks right now and says what it found on the line underneath: that you're up to date, that a version is downloading, or that the check couldn't be made.

When an update is found it downloads quietly in the background; you can carry on working, and there's no progress bar in your way. Once it's ready a Restart to update button appears here, and a notice appears in the corner of the desk with a Restart button of its own. Nothing is installed until you say so. If you'd rather not stop what you're doing, ignore it — the update installs by itself the next time you quit Chip Hippo, and restarting here runs the same "you have unsaved changes" prompt that quitting does, so a design in progress is never lost to an update.

The check itself is the only thing sent, and only to GitHub. Chip Hippo has no analytics and reports nothing about you or your circuits.

You'll see this tab differently depending on where your copy came from. A copy installed from the Mac App Store updates through the App Store like every other app there, so this tab shows only the version and says so — there are no controls, because there'd be nothing for them to do. A development build says that updates are only available in installed builds.

What else persists automatically

A few things aren't part of this dialog but are remembered between sessions without any action on your part: the app window's position and size, the desk camera — your current pan position and zoom level — and which panels you left open (the parts tray, the build guide, the analyzer, the AI builder). The ones you can resize remember that too: the parts tray's width, and the analyzer and AI builder's height. The analyzer also remembers whether it was on Timing or Transitions. Close Chip Hippo and reopen it, and you're back exactly where you left off.

The desk padlock isn't one of these: it's saved in the project file, so it belongs to the project rather than to the app (see The Desk & Breadboards).

See Files, Saving & Undo for how your circuit itself is saved.