Circuits in your deck
A circuit on a slide is not a picture of one. It solves where it sits, it takes its resistance from a slider, and it can keep following the circuit you go on editing in the studio.
Add to deck#
Add to deck is the primary button in the studio toolbar. The dialog shows a preview of the schematic as it will land, and asks four things: what to add, which deck, which slide, and whether the object stays linked.
The four outputs#
| Output | What lands on the slide |
|---|---|
| Interactive schematic | Live object — switches toggle, values stay editable inline. |
| Static schematic | The drawing alone; nothing moves, nothing reacts. |
| Simulation animation | Interactive, with current flow animated from the solved operating point. |
| Measurement summary | A live table of node voltages and component currents. |
Simulation animation is offered only when the circuit solves — a circuit with a refusal has no operating point for the flow to come from, and the disabled row says so: "The circuit doesn't solve yet — fix the refusal first."
Deck and slide#
The deck list holds every deck in your workspace, plus This deck (open now) when you opened the studio from a deck. With no decks at all it says "No decks yet — create one from the dashboard first."
Then pick where it goes: Current slide, New slide, or Choose… for a named slide from that deck. Adding into the open deck dispatches straight into it, so ⌘Z undoes it like any other edit; adding into a closed deck loads it, appends, and saves. When it lands you get told where: "Added to the slide.", "Added to a new slide.", or "Added to “Lecture 4”."
Linked, or a copy#
A circuit that lives in your library can stay linked:
> Link to this circuit — the deck object follows future revisions (and can detach later).
A linked object stores the source's id, the revision it was inserted at, and a full cached copy of the document, so the slide renders from its own cache and never waits on a lookup. When the source moves on, a banner appears on the object — "Circuit updated in Studio (rev 12)." — with three buttons:
- Update — reload the source and follow it from here.
- Keep this version — mute the banner for that revision. The slide keeps rendering what it has.
- Detach — copy the circuit into the deck and stop following the source.
Nothing ever silently overwrites a prepared slide. Unchecking the box embeds a self-contained copy instead, which is what a circuit opened from inside a deck always gets: "This circuit lives inside a deck, so the copy is self-contained."
Starting from the slide instead#
You do not have to begin in the studio. Insert a Circuit from the deck's own toolbar and it arrives as a working, grounded loop — a 9 V supply, a switch, a 220 Ω resistor and a ground, wired up and named New circuit — so the operating point has something true to say the moment it lands. That circuit is embedded: the deck owns it, and its edits are ordinary deck history. Press Open Circuit Studio from its inspector whenever you want the full workspace.
Decks made before the studio existed are not left behind either. A circuit drawn in the old cell-grid format is migrated to a real document the first time it renders, and persists in the new shape on its first edit.
The object on the slide#
The inspector's View row switches between four renderings of the same document, and switching costs nothing — the document is the same either way:
| View | What it draws |
|---|---|
| Live | The schematic, solved, with a readout strip beneath it. |
| Static | The schematic alone. |
| Readings | The measurement table, captioned with the circuit's name, its revision, and DC operating point. |
| Waveform | The transient run, as a scope trace. |
The Live readout carries the headline: the source current when the circuit has exactly one source, otherwise the total power, followed by what is worth knowing — · switch open, · steady state, and, for a circuit driven only by a signal, · 1.00 V AC in. A circuit driven purely by an AC amplitude reads 0 A at DC, which is true and reads as nothing happening, so the readout says where the action is instead.
If the circuit refuses, the object shows the refusal in place. A figure that cannot be computed says why, rather than drawing something that looks like an answer.
Waveform traces nets by name, not by id: an id is derived from wire coordinates and would change the moment somebody nudged a wire, silently blanking a figure in a prepared deck. Only nets you named in the studio are offered. The run itself is the one configured in the studio — the inspector says which: "Runs 50.0 ms at 20.0 µs a step. Set the run in Circuit Studio's Transient tab.", or, when there is none, "This circuit has no run configured — open Circuit Studio's Transient tab to set one."
The rest of the inspector is presentation: Dress (Engineering or Presentation), Values, Current flow, Node voltages, and a Caption. These are per-object overrides — they dress this instance without touching the circuit everyone else is linked to.
Editing a placed circuit#
Two tiers, the same as every other object.
Double-click the object and it becomes a working canvas in place, with a floating toolbar: Open Circuit Studio, Add ▾ (resistor, capacitor, inductor, DC and AC voltage sources, ground, switch, diode, zener, op-amp, transformer, and both probes), Wire, a value box for the selected part, Open or Close for a selected switch, rotate, mirror, Delete, a play/pause for the current animation, Labels ▾, an Eng / Pres toggle, and Detach on a linked object.
Open Circuit Studio — on that toolbar, or in the inspector — opens the full workspace over the deck. Nothing is copied: every commit lands in the deck's own history, so ⌘Z never cares which surface made the change.
Parameter slots#
Every component that carries a value offers it as a bindable slot, named the way you would say it out loud:
- R1 · resistance
- C1 · capacitance
- V1 · voltage
Slots are keyed by the component, not by its name, so a binding survives renaming R1 to R7 or dragging it across the sheet.
Units are the ones an engineer would put on a slider. Ohms, volts and amps are offered as they are. Capacitance is offered in µF and inductance in mH, because nobody drags a capacitor from 0.000001 to 0.001 — the part is stamped 10 µF and that is the number the audience reads off the schematic. Everything downstream of the netlist still sees farads and henries.
To wire one up, add a parameter panel to the slide, then in the variable's Drives row choose the slot from the list — each entry reads as the object's name, the slot, and its unit. The binding shows up as a row you can Unbind later. See Reactive documents.
How re-solving works#
Drag the slider and the bound value is written into the circuit document. That produces a new document — the old one is untouched — and because results are cached on document identity, a new document means a fresh solve and everything derived from it redraws: node voltages, currents, the animated flow, the readings table, the waveform. Nothing is recomputed that did not change; a circuit that nothing touched keeps the answer it already had, however many thumbnails are on screen.
A slider writes the number, not the text you typed. The value's display string is dropped when a binding drives it, so the schematic never shows the old number beside the new one.
Exporting a slide with a circuit#
PDF and Images capture the circuit's rendered appearance at the selected resolution. PowerPoint uses an image capture where available, with a placeholder fallback. The Web embed provides a read-only slide viewer; it does not offer the editor's controls or reactive recomputation. Check the exported result before sharing. See Import & export.
Next#
- Tutorial: an RC filter from scratch — the whole path, one circuit at a time.
- Reactive documents — the parameter system these slots plug into.
- Presenting — a circuit stays live in front of the room.