January 5, 2026
Beep beep—HN melts down (in a good way)
Show HN: Circuit Artist –Circuit simulator with propagation animation and rewind
Retro 'Paint' circuits game has geeks cheering—and nitpicking
TLDR: Circuit Artist just landed a big glow-and-rewind update with layers and a gentler campaign. Comments gush, debate pixel-paint wiring versus auto-routing like Turing Complete, and push for resistors and capacitors—proof this playful sandbox is teaching, sparking curiosity, and inspiring builders
Hacker News is buzzing over Circuit Artist, a playful circuit-drawing game that makes digital signals literally glow across your wires as they travel. The dev dropped a chunky update: more realistic delays, pause-and-rewind, Photoshop-style layers, a gentle campaign, beeps for busy circuits, and even a simple energy meter. But the comments are the real show.
The lovefest is loud—think “What a gem” and “Holy moly”—with praise for turning textbook timing into eye candy and for giving wiring layout real consequences. Fans say the Elmore delay (a fancy way to make far wires slower) finally makes the map matter.
Then the first skirmish: the pixel‑paint layout. One camp adores the lo‑fi vibe and hands‑on tinkering; the other wants slick auto‑routing like in Turing Complete. It’s cozy pixel art versus productivity polish, and nobody’s backing down.
A second chorus demands analog toys: “add resistors and capacitors,” begs one parent, who also plans to try it on their electronics‑loving kid. Meanwhile, the new beeps sparked jokes about turning logic into a rave, and those glowing traces were dubbed “mesmerizing screensaver material.”
Open source fans cheer too: it’s on GitHub. Verdict? Not just a simulator—this is a sandbox fueling nostalgia, discovery, and delicious nerd drama
Key Points
- •Version 1.1 introduces a variable-delay, event-driven simulation that models wire topology and Elmore delay, including fanout effects.
- •Signal propagation is visualized by mapping distances to pixels with real-time shader-based glow rendering.
- •A delta-based simulation enables pausing and rewinding to interact with and debug cyclic circuits.
- •The game adds up to three layers for wiring (NANDs only on the bottom layer), with faster propagation on upper layers and inter-layer connections.
- •New features include a gradual campaign, blueprint inventory for reuse, sound tied to circuit activity, a simplified energy efficiency metric, and open-source GPLv3 code with Linux/macOS build instructions.