Circuit Blocks Update

Today I was focused on the implementation of loading a circuit as a block. This creates a block part in the current circuit that may be wired up, and the circuit saved.

This was quite fun to do and also highlighted a major problem where it was easy to over-write the circuit block saved file with the new circuit without noticing until you load the circuit later where the circuit block data file has then been replaced.

To get around this problem, when a circuit is loaded as a block, the current file name should be set to an empty string.

I also check that the required pins exist when wiring up to a circuit block, and if they don’t, the part is highlighted in red, and these wire connections are not made.

Now I need to set up test circuits using blocks. After this, I need to consider how to implemented nested blocks — to give great power to the App. Hmm, I wonder how that will affect the speed?

Implementing circuit blocks has been easier than I expected since I compile them on the fly from circuit data, so I just added a file menu option to load a circuit as a block. The block is like a new part added to the available parts. It just gets IO pins added, and its internal logic processes the nodes specified by its associated circuit.

But maybe it will not be easy to implement the nested blocks?

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