Good documentation is extremely useful when conceiving, building, or sharing electronic circuit designs, but traditional schematics and technical drawings are difficult for non-professionals to interpret and create. Makers can benefit from intuitive illustrations that look good enough to share. Circuit Canvas, developed by Oyvind Nydal Dahl, makes it easy to quickly create beautiful and useful illustrated diagrams.

Circuit Canvas is quite similar to Fritzing, but developed with the goals of being easy to use and fast. A user can create a schematic or an illustrated diagram for a basic circuit in less than a minute — if the components already exist in the library. But as with Fritzing, users may end up in a situation where they need to add custom parts. Circuit Canvas promises to make that process as painless as possible and even supports Fritzing parts, so it can take advantage of that ecosystem’s huge library.

At this time, Circuit Canvas already has a substantial library of parts. That includes Arduino UNO and Arduino Nano development boards, as well as other boards that are compatible with the Arduino IDE, such as the Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C3 and the Raspberry Pi Pico. And, of course, there are many discrete components, ICs, and modules in the library to work with.

Users can either build schematics using standard symbols, or more friendly illustrated diagrams. In the future, the two document types will link together. Creating a diagram is as simple as placing components and drawing wires between them. After making the connections, users can move components around and the wires will automatically follow.

If you’ve been looking for a way to improve the documentation for your Arduino projects, then Circuit Canvas is worth checking out. It is free to try and you can run it right in your browser now.