Drawing digital circuits can become a mess very fast which makes testing those even more difficult. Doing it offline is a painful job with all those wires. So, what GUI software is recommended for building digital circuits and testing them?
The original Logisim is currently unmaintained, however Logisim Evolution is now the successor, and still open source and maintained at https://github.com/logisim-evolution/logisim-evolution. It has support for Linux (Deb and RPM), Mac and Windows. It is still purely digital, and easy to run.
Logisim is not in the repos, but being a single java jar, should be fairly easy to get going. It is purely digital, without the discrete and analogue components. It is however quite sophisticated - I've been putting together a simulation of a single instruction CPU with it.
Instructions for getting and running it:
Download the .jar file from http://sourceforge.net/projects/circuit/
If you saved the file to ~/apps/logisim-generic-2.7.1.jar, you can run it from a terminal with:
java -jar ~/apps/logisim-generic-2.7.1.jar
To save yourself from typing that the whole time, create the executable ~/bin/logisim containing
#!/bin/sh
java -jar ~/apps/logisim-generic-2.7.1.jar
Make it executable:
chmod +x ~/bin/logisim
If ~/bin existed before, it's already in your $PATH. Otherwise, re-login to update your $PATH. From now on, you can start it by running:
logisim
If you update logisim later, it's as easy as putting the new file in ~/apps/ and change the filename in ~/bin/logisim
Well, now it's there in the ubuntu 14.04 repositories as well, just type :-
sudo apt-get install logisim
to install it.
