magneval / brainbox

Teaching-focused digital circuit simulator. Allows anyone to graphically connect objects within a awesome web-browser application without knowing coding or hacking.

Brainbox - working with real device

Logic gates are the basic building blocks of any digital system. It is an electronic circuit having one or more than one input and only one output. The relationship between the input and the output is based on a certain logic. Based on this, logic gates are named as AND gate, OR gate, NOT gate etc.

Now you can edit and run your digital circuit simulation designs online on PCs, Macs, thin clients, tablets, smart phones, smart TVs and e-book readers without any installation. You can use BrainBox in the office, classroom or at home and connect even your RaspberryPi to drive real physical devices.

Test the program on http://www.brainbox-demo.de

How to install it

You can start and run brainbox for different user groups.

Single User

Ideal for your own use. Simply start and get started. No user administration or login and full access to all features.

npm install -g brainbox
brainbox

Shared

Everyone has access to the simulator without registration. Drawings and documents can also be saved and you always get a unique URL when saving to access the document again later. Ideal to play with the simulator in smaller or larger groups and share your work with others.

npm install brainbox
brainbox --storage shared-public

Multi User

Simulator is available for everyone in a read only mode. However, only logged in persons can save or change documents. Private files are not publicly accessible. Working groups and tasks can be created and distributed. Ideal for schools and in education.

npm install brainbox
brainbox --storage multiple-user

As mention before you must install brainbox via npm. But what is npm?

NPM is the package manager for NodeJS applications.

It's the world's largest software registry, with approximately 3 billion downloads per week. Open-source developers from every continent use npm to share and borrow packages, and many organizations use npm to manage private development as well.

If you didn't have installed NodeJS and npm - go ahead and install it

See the running example on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUkAIjTaNXI

On Desktop

You can install the application even in your local intranet for training purpose. Just install and run the backend server (to store and load the circuit files) on every computer which can run a simple node.js server.

On a Raspberry Pi

You have full access to the GPIO pins on you RaspberryPi with the browser based digital circuit simulator. If node.js already running on your raspi you need just to install the simulator like on your desktop

Run from source code

I develop the project with yarn to build my webpack. YARN runs on Node.js, so if you don't have npm installed already, go ahead and install it.

Install dependencies with npm

yarn install

Run the backend server

node ./app/backend/index.js

Run the webpack builder in dev mode

open a second console and run

yarn dev