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The Desk & Breadboards

The desk is Chip Hippo's infinite, pannable, zoomable workspace — the place every board, chip, wire, and power source lives. This page covers how to move around the desk and how breadboards actually work under the hood: they are not single parts but individual strips — a pin-board plus power rails — that snap and mate together the way real boards do on a bench.

A Full 830 breadboard on the desk, with a spare power rail turned on end beside it

Pan, zoom & fit to screen

The desk has no edges — pan and zoom to work at whatever scale suits the circuit in front of you.

A faint dot grid marks the 0.1 in hole pitch under everything you place; it coarsens at low zoom and disappears entirely once you're zoomed out too far for individual holes to matter. Zoom and pan position are remembered between sessions.

The desk padlock

A padlock sits in the desk's top-right corner, across from the tab strip. Click it (or press Cmd/Ctrl+L) to shut it, and the scroll wheel stops reaching the desk.

It exists for one input in particular. A Magic Mouse — and some trackpads — reports a scroll from a finger merely resting on the surface, so the wheel is the one thing that moves the desk without being asked to; midway through seating a chip, that's a circuit that slides out from under you. Everything else still works while it's locked: drag-to-pan, the zoom cluster, the keyboard shortcuts above, and Fit. It's the wheel that's locked, not the camera.

The padlock's shape changes rather than just its colour — an open shackle when the wheel is live, a shut one when it isn't. The state lasts for the session only and starts open every launch, so a new session never greets you with a desk that ignores the wheel for a reason you've forgotten. The schematic view has a wheel of its own and no padlock over it.

Breadboards are strips

A real solderless breadboard is not one molded part — it's a centre pin-board with one or two power-rail strips dovetailed onto its top and bottom edges. Chip Hippo models this literally: each strip is its own object on the desk, and what looks like "a breadboard" is a small kit of strips placed together in one action.

The palette offers three assembled kits:

On a pin-board, rows run top to bottom as j i h g f, then the trench, then e d c b a. The trench is the gap down the centre that isolates the top half of each column from the bottom half electrically — a DIP chip straddles the trench, with one row of pins in f and the other in e, exactly as it would seat on a real board. A power-rail strip carries both a + and a − line, each one continuous connection along its whole length, independent of every other strip.

See Chips & Components for how chips and discretes seat into the grid, and Power & Clock Sources for feeding a rail from a PSU.

Kits vs. loose strips

Below the assembled kits, the palette also offers the individual strips on their own — a bare Full pin-board, a bare Half pin-board, a spare Full power rail, and a spare Half power rail. Reach for these when a board shipped without enough rails, when you want a rail somewhere a kit wouldn't put one, or when you're building up a custom layout strip by strip. Placing, ghosting, and overlap checking all work identically whether you're dropping a whole kit or a single loose strip.

Snapping & mating

Drop a strip within a couple of tenths of an inch of another strip it can dovetail with — matching width when stacked, matching height side by side, meeting flush with no gap — and it snaps into place automatically. This is the same magnetic pull whether you're dragging a placed strip or holding a fresh one from the palette; a whole kit snaps as one piece, and the pull only ever engages when the snapped position is still legal (it will never pull a strip into an illegal overlap).

Two strips that end up flush mate: they join a shared group and from then on drag together as one rigid unit, just like a real breadboard's rails stay attached to its pin-board when you nudge it on the bench. A kit arrives pre-grouped; anything you drop flush against an existing board joins its group (or merges two groups into one, if it bridges a gap). When several strips are mated, clicking any one of them highlights the whole set — the outline traces the union of the group's strips, so flush neighbours read as one board rather than showing a seam between them.

Selecting things

Clicking a board, part, wire, bus or note selects that one thing, and clicking empty desk clears the selection. There are two ways to select several at once, and they are complementary:

Cmd/Ctrl-clicking a board takes its whole snapped group, the same set a plain click selects. Clicking a bus takes all of its member wires — a bus is bookkeeping over wires, and the wires are what a delete or a copy acts on. Clicking empty desk with the modifier held leaves the selection alone rather than clearing it: an add that landed on nothing has nothing to add.

Notes and labels are the one thing a multi-selection can't hold, so Cmd/Ctrl-clicking one does nothing; a plain click still selects it.

On macOS this is Cmd, not Ctrl — the modifier the rest of the platform's lists use. Ctrl-click there is the system's secondary click, and it keeps that job: it still opens an item's context menu.

Either way the result is one selection: Delete removes all of it in a single step, Cmd/Ctrl+C copies it (as a whole design, if it includes boards — see Projects & Desktops), and Esc clears it. Cmd/Ctrl+A selects the entire desk.

A selection also moves as one. Grab any part in it and the whole set travels by the same amount, keeping the arrangement you built; hold Option as you press and the wiring comes too — every wire end, and every resistor or LED leg, plugged into any member. The drop is all or nothing, and the move is one Cmd/Ctrl+Z. See Moving several parts at once for the whole of it.

Boards are the exception, and it's the one thing to know before you drag a mixed selection. A board in the set makes a press on a part do nothing at all — strips have their own drag, which carries everything seated on them under mating and overlap rules a part re-seat knows nothing about — and the selection is left untouched so you can Cmd/Ctrl-click the board back out. Grabbing the board instead drags that board's own group (and everything seated on it) in the usual way, replacing the selection as any plain click does.

Nothing can be selected while the simulation is running — the topology is frozen, so a selection would be one you couldn't act on.

Groups & breaking a snap

Grabbing a mated strip normally drags the whole group together. To pull just part of a group apart, hold a modifier while you start the drag:

Either way, only strips still reachable through the group come along; a strip that merely happens to sit flush elsewhere in the layout is left behind. When you drop a torn-off run, both the piece you moved and what's left of the original group are re-evaluated — each is split into fresh groups based on what's still actually mated within it, so the two halves never end up sharing a group id after the break.

Rotating a rail

Power rails can rotate; pin-boards cannot. A pin-board's trench (and every DIP seated across it) only makes sense in one orientation, so it's locked at 0°. A rail strip is just two parallel lines of holes, so it reads the same standing on end — turned 90° it becomes a vertical signal bus you can run alongside a board and tap into at any point along its length.

Press R while a rail is in hand (mid-placement, before you click it down) to cycle its rotation through 0°/90°/180°/270°. Once a strip is placed its angle is fixed; to change it, pick it up again. Rotating doesn't change anything electrically — a rail is one continuous node however it's turned — it only changes which way the strip's footprint runs on the desk.

Next: Chips & Components for populating a board, or Wiring, Nets & Buses for connecting everything up.