Welcome to TinkerCAD Circuits walkthrough!

This is video and annotation by Kyle Liao on the TinkerCAD circuits simulator.

To get things straight, I haven’t used TinkerCAD services in years and never knew they expanded to circuits. THIS IS SO COOL. It’s an arduino simulator that runs in the browser. Not only does it simulate the physical side of the certain; it obviously lets you code in it. It uses block style code which is very similar to scratch, google blockly, etc.

To start you are going to want to make an account with TinkerCAD, which is owned by AutoCAD. I personally choose to log in with google. This is a do as I say, not do what I do moment. You should avoid using your google account to sign in for everything, but I’d rather you sign in with google then use the same password for everything. To each their own.

Next you are going to look at the left side of the dashboard and go into circuits. You might think, “Kyle, I really wanna try the 3D Objects(CAD)!”, don’t worry we will have a separate post for that.

You are going to create a new circuit and from there starts where the video is required. For me it’s a piece of nostalgia. I remember in middle school when we worked on Arduinos in my computer class. It was great. I spent hours programming the most inefficient traffic light ever. You can now do the same.

Using a breadboard, which is a device that allows you to wire up your electronics without solder(permanently) them together. To be a hundred percent honest with you, I don’t really know how they work other than that it’s a piece of plastic with metal strips along the positive and negative sides.

This is a guide for how they work. I didn’t write it. Can you tell? BREADBOARDS.

From there you can get an arduino on your workspace. An arduino is a simple small board computer. You give it information to store and it executes commands based on electricity. It has pins that you connect hardware to such as a light. When you tell an arduino to turn a light on, it’s telling the pin to turn on electricity and at what level. It’s a concept I didn’t understand till after I started coding on one and you probably won’t either, but I thought a heads up would be nice.

From there the concept expands to more hardware, such as sensors, batteries, and other misc. I thought it was really cool and originally found out from a list of arduino simulators. I know! A list! LIST

In 30 minutes while watching the video you should be able to make a circuit. Attempt to make a traffic light if you so desire. If you can do it in less than 5 hours then you win.

You can learn more about TinkerCAD circuits with websites such as Maker Pro and Autodesk TinkerCAD.