Electric current and voltage are fundamental to learning, understanding, and debugging circuits. Although both can be measured using tools such as multimeters and oscilloscopes, electric current is much more difficult to measure because users have to unplug parts of a circuit and then insert the measuring tools in serial. Furthermore, users need to restore the circuits back to its original state after measurements have been taken. In practice, this cumbersome process poses a formidable barrier to knowing how current flows throughout a circuit. We present CurrentViz, a system that can sense and visualize the electric current flowing through a circuit, which helps users quickly understand otherwise invisible circuit behavior. It supports fully automatic, ubiquitous, and real-time collection of amperage information of breadboarded circuits. It also supports visualization of the amperage data on a circuit schematic to provide anintuitive view into the current state of a circuit.
Te-Yen Wu, Hao-Ping Shen, Yu-Chian Wu, Yu-An Chen, Pin-Sung Ku, Ming-Wei Hsu, Jun-You Liu, Yu-Chih Lin, and Mike Y. Chen. 2017. CurrentViz: Sensing and Visualizing Electric Current Flows of Breadboarded Circuits. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 343–349.