circuitsnap

Snap it, sim it. Turn a circuit drawing — a photo, a sketch, or just a description — into a live simulation in Falstad's CircuitJS1.

Ships as an MCP server (so Claude and other assistants can build circuits), a CLI, and a library.

$ circuitsnap build rc.json
https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html?ctz=CQAgjCAMB0l3BWcMBMcUHYMGZIA4UA2ATmIxAUgo...

$ 1 0.000005 10.20027730826997 50 5 50
v 128 64 192 64 0 0 40 5 0 0 0.5
r 384 64 448 64 0 10000
c 128 176 192 176 0 0.000001 0 0
...

Open the URL and the circuit is running.

Why

Asking a language model to write CircuitJS1's file format directly does not work. The format is positional and unforgiving — v 128 64 192 64 0 0 40 5 0 0 0.5 has six trailing parameters whose order, units and flag bits are only discoverable by reading the simulator's Java source. A wrong guess produces a circuit that loads happily and simulates incorrectly, which is the worst possible failure: the user cannot tell.

circuitsnap moves that job into tested code. The model describes what connects to what; this library handles format, geometry, escaping and encoding.

Install

npm install -g circuitsnap

As an MCP server

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "circuitsnap": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "circuitsnap-mcp"] }
  }
}

(circuitsnap is the CLI; circuitsnap-mcp is the stdio server. circuitsnap mcp runs the server too, if you prefer a single binary.)

For Claude Code, also copy skills/circuitsnap/ into .claude/skills/ to get the /circuitsnap workflow, which covers reading a drawing and verifying the result.

Usage

Describe the circuit as a netlist — components and net names, no coordinates:

{
  "title": "RC lowpass",
  "components": [
    { "id": "V1", "kind": "voltage",   "nodes": ["gnd", "in"],  "value": 5 },
    { "id": "R1", "kind": "resistor",  "nodes": ["in", "out"],  "value": "10k" },
    { "id": "C1", "kind": "capacitor", "nodes": ["out", "gnd"], "value": "1uF" }
  ]
}

Terminals sharing a net name are connected. That is the whole model.

circuitsnap build rc.json          # URL + circuit text
circuitsnap build rc.json --url    # just the URL
circuitsnap elements               # pin order and parameters for every kind
circuitsnap decode "<share-url>"   # read someone else's circuit

As a library:

import { snap } from 'circuitsnap';

const { url, text, diagnostics } = snap({
  components: [
    { id: 'V1', kind: 'voltage',  nodes: ['gnd', 'in'], value: 5 },
    { id: 'R1', kind: 'resistor', nodes: ['in', 'gnd'], value: '1k' },
  ],
});
console.log(url.url);

Values

Engineering notation, written the way a person writes it on a schematic:

Input	Value
"10k"	10 000
"2.2uF"	2.2e-6
"4k7"	4700
"1M"	1e6 (mega, not milli)
"1R2"	1.2

M is mega and m is milli — the schematic convention. SPICE's M-means-milli would turn a hand-labelled "10M resistor" into 10 milliohms.

Elements

wire, resistor, capacitor, inductor, voltage, rail, ground, switch, diode, led, current, labeledNode, transistor, opamp, output, probe, text.

Run circuitsnap elements for pin order, parameters, units and defaults. Pin order matters: a transistor is [base, collector, emitter], an op-amp is [minus, plus, out].

Ground

Use the net name gnd (or ground, 0, vss). Those terminals get a real ground symbol, not a label — a labeled node named "gnd" carries no 0 V reference and would leave the solver without a datum. circuitsnap warns if a circuit has no ground at all.

How it works

The pipeline is netlist -> validate -> lay out -> emit -> URL, with only the reading a drawing step needing a model. Two decisions are worth knowing about:

• Nets are wired with named labels, not routed wires. An auto-router that is 95% correct produces circuits that look right and simulate wrong. A label next to a pin is verifiable. Output reads like a hierarchical schematic.
• We emit the legacy text format, not XML. Current upstream writes XML but still reads text, so text is the only encoding that loads on both old and new builds.

See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the reasoning and docs/FORMAT.md for the file-format reference, derived from the upstream source with line citations.

Correctness

The format is reverse-engineered, so correctness is load-bearing:

• 372 upstream circuits round-trip byte-identically through the parser.
• Generated output is checked for terminal coincidence, escaping, and the flag bits upstream forces on.
• Live verification: generated circuits are loaded into the real simulator and node voltages read back. That is how the multi-pin geometry was validated — an op-amp follower must actually follow, and a transistor must report fwd active with Ic/Ib = β.

npm run reference:fetch   # clone upstream (not vendored; see docs/LICENSING.md)
npm test

The test suite makes no network requests.

Licence

circuitsnap is MIT. CircuitJS1 is GPL-2.0-or-later by Paul Falstad and Iain Sharp, and is neither bundled nor modified here — circuitsnap generates files in its format and opens its URL. See docs/LICENSING.md for the full reasoning, including how this project handles falstad.com's AI-crawler signals (short version: no crawling, no scraping, tests are fully offline, and --base-url lets you point at your own self-hosted copy).

Not affiliated with or endorsed by the CircuitJS1 authors.