TinyCAD Manual

Your first drawing

This page will take you through the steps of drawing your first circuit diagram with TinyCAD.

At its simplest level, a TinyCAD drawing is a collection of symbols linked using wires. In this example, you will place some symbols and then join them up with wires.

Example circuit

Here is a simple circuit to draw:

Simple battery, resistor, and LED circuit used in the tutorial

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Video Walkthrough

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Video walkthrough showing how to edit and reposition symbol text.

Step by step guide

Symbol libraries

  1. Type battery in the search box.
  2. Select Multi Cell Battery.
  3. Drag the symbol from the symbol panel onto the drawing.

Now place a resistor and an LED.

Use the toolbar rotate/flip controls to orient symbols:

Rotate and flip controls used to change symbol orientation

If you make a mistake, use Undo/Redo:

Undo and Redo toolbar buttons

Your drawing should look similar to:

Battery, resistor, and LED symbols placed on the drawing before wiring

Wiring up a circuit

  1. Select the Wire tool.
  2. Click a battery terminal to start a wire.
  3. Move to the resistor terminal and click again to place the wire.

Wires snap to valid symbol connection points. A red circle indicates a snap location.

Tip: press W on the keyboard to re-enter wire mode quickly.

After wiring, it should look similar to:

Example circuit after the battery, resistor, and LED have been wired together

Annotating the drawing

Symbols need component values and references. In TinyCAD these are typically the symbol Name and Ref fields.

  1. Click the battery.
  2. Go to the Symbol panel at the bottom.
  3. Change BATTERY_2 to 9V.
  4. Change reference Z? to B1.

Repeat for the other parts:

  • Resistor: Name 1K, Ref R1
  • LED: Name Red Led, Ref D1

If a name/reference is hidden, use the checkbox controls to show or hide text on the drawing.

Loading and saving

Browser Local Files

To save your drawing use the “Save As” or “Save” buttons on the toolbar:

The toolbar buttons for Save and Save As

Browser Google

Your first drawing is complete. To rename it:

  1. Click the drawing name at the top (for example tCad1.dsn).
  2. Rename it to First Drawing.dsn.
  3. Press Enter.

Editable drawing title field used to rename the current design

Save to Google Drive using the Save icon.

To load it again from Google Drive:

  1. Open https://drive.google.com/drive/.
  2. Find the drawing.
  3. Right-click and choose Open with -> TinyCAD.

Google Drive context menu showing Open with TinyCAD for a drawing file

You can also rename and delete TinyCAD designs in Google Drive.

Desktop App

Your first drawing is complete. To save it from the desktop app:

  1. Open File -> Save As.
  2. Choose a folder on your computer.
  3. Save the drawing as First Drawing.dsn.

To load it again later:

  1. Open File -> Open.
  2. Browse to First Drawing.dsn.
  3. Select the file and open it.

TinyCAD desktop uses the same .dsn format as TinyCAD in the browser. You can download a drawing from Google Drive and open it in the desktop app.

Likewise, you can use drawings you have done on the Desktop version of TinyCAD with the Browser based version.

Further reading

For custom symbols and libraries, continue with Custom symbol libraries.

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