GSoC 2023 projects ideas

[tachyons]

We are currently working on project ideas list for Google summer of code 2023. Our focus this year is stability and discoverability. You can suggest your ideas in this thread.

[Malavi1]

I have doubt !? shall I need to explain just my project idea? or should I have to express my idea with demo?

[tachyons]

No, just a concise idea is enough. We well evaluate and add to list if feasible

[tanmoysrt]

@tachyons
As we discussed, I came to know that. The WIP contest is for showcasing our project/circuit, where users can build and vote for other projects to enable gamification.

Proposed Ideas regarding Discoverability and Gamification

• Contest Arrangement with Auto-judgement: Enable any user to create the contest, where they can pre-define expected input and output. So when some user participates, the judging system can decide the correctness and provide a score. Based on the score and time required by the user, we can give a leaderboard of ranking for the user.

• Practice Set with Auto-judgement: We can create a curated list of questions. Where users can practice, level up their skills, and earn points. After earning certain points, they can earn badges which they can share on social, To verify their circuit, we also need an auto-judgement system.

---

For auto-judging, the user can hook some labels to the input and output point; we can generate the truth table or something to match the expected output.

[tachyons]

This an interesting idea, we discussed this last year as well. The auto judgement can be integrated with testbench and can be integrated with assignments as well. But for the weekly contest, our current vision is to allow any circuits and let people to choose best via voting. It need not be fully functional.

[tanmoysrt]

Thanks for the reply.
Understood the concept of weekly contest. The voting based system is great and will interest people to explore different type of circuit.

The custom contest hositng can help in that situation, when some group of student want to compete . For coding we normally use Gfg to host contest, but for circuit ig there is no single platform.

Also., if there an auto-judgement system will be built, we can have an practice set, which can help student to learn and grow rapidly.
Thank you

[VaibhavUpreti]

Adding Real Time Collaboration of Circuits

One project Idea that can increase collaboration in CiruitVerse can be to implement real time collaboration of circuits where users can create simulator sessions and work on circuits together.

For Signed Out users

Create Sessions

• that anyone can join.
• Choose Group, or create a new group from the simulator.
• display all members that have joined the session with avatar on top, something like in google docs

Manage Sessions' permissions

• Everyone can edit
• Only the user that created session can edit
• allow user to permissions with email

Group Wise Implementation

Create Sessions

NOTE: Group sessions would be only for the group members, in order to join the session we can invite the user from a prompt in simulator

Manage Sessions' permissions

Teachers can easily make a session, with various permissions -

1. Anyone can edit
2. Only mentors can edit
3. Only the group owner can edit

TechStack

JavaScript, Operational Transformation

[Waishnav]

I also thought of the same feature but yes CPU and RAM consumption would be higher. As we need to implement web sockets for that.
Though I think, students may want to collaborate with other students to make circuits and learn together with them.

[Waishnav]

Additionally, we can reduce the resources by implementing sockets with delta shared across sockets, delta is nothing but user-edited changes.
For this proper system design need to do both the frontend and backend parts.

[tachyons]

Additionally, we can reduce the resources by implementing sockets with delta shared across sockets, delta is nothing but user-edited changes.
For this proper system design need to do both the frontend and backend parts.

We don't need to reinvent the wheel as protocols like CRDT are available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_type . But at-least a proof of concept is needed to proceed as this requires update in core simulator engine without breaking backward compatibility

[gr455]

Since CircuitVerse simulator is technically just a graph with nodes being the elements and the edges being the wires, existing graph CRDTs could be helpful to look into

[R4d104ct1v1ty]

@tachyons I think this will not be that heavy on CPU f websockets is used. As far as I know it is not that resource heavy to maintain websocket connections.

[cAmartya]

@tachyons as we discussed, my ideas to increase discoverability are,

Recommendation system based on User search history and his interests

I noticed that some of the circuits have tags associated with them, we can use those tags. Depending on availability of resources, we can take around 3 or more last visits of the user, and cater a filtered search for the user(by building a set of tags that would loosely represnt his preference).

For example, in our college, we were told to design circuits using only NAND or NOR gates, if I search for a circuit say, SR Latch I would prefer to see a NAND or NOR implementation of the circuit as the top results, rather than the general implementation which uses AND, OR gates. In this case, my preference maybe defined as the pressence of NAND gates, which can be obtained from the tags of circuits of my previous visits.
Similarly, some other common preferences(categories) may be identified, like smaller implementations(with fewer number of gates), etc.

Also, I noticed that there is an upvote feature, but it is rarely used. However, if that system is used by the users, we can further refine the filtered search by popularity(or better implementaion) of circuits.

---

Automated generation of tags for an untagged circuit

Starting with basics, we can recommend the the most used gates as the tags, and then proceed to complicated identification like a latches, flip-flops, or something similar.

I noticed that if a circuit expression is given to the Circuit Analyzer, it produces a circuit which might not be optimized but is correct. We can use a similar idea to deduce a circuit expression from a properly annotated circuit, which can help in

• cross-verification of the circuit with the tags/title of the circuit using the auto-judgement feature, to prevent the spreading of erroneous circuits.
• it will be easier to generate complicated tags from the circuit expression, and therefore we can group similar circuits in terms of the final output it produces. The similar circuits can be ranked on basis of area(smaller is better), frequency of operation(higher is better), power consumption, etc. A score may be generated for each of them, and can be assigned as tags for the circuit, so that a user can learn and identify the better implementation of a circuit.

[tachyons]

Recommendation system based on User search history and interests

There is already a WIP recommendation system which is currently stalled due to it's resource usage. But we don't want to build another tracker to understand users' interests as it can be a privacy issue.

Automated generation of tags for an untagged circuit

This is a good idea, but hard to get it right without supervision. This PR attempts almost the same thing. But there is till scope for improvement

[cAmartya]

@tachyons
Thanks for the reply. I was looking at the work done in PR #3290, it covers one of the ideas I proposed. However, do you think generating a circuit expression from a well annotated circuit will be viable? If yes, then I think we can work on deducing the purpose(like if it is a SR LATCH, etc) of the circuit, which might be a better tag than adding gates as the tags of the circuits(current one, done in PR #3290 ) in my opinion.

[VaibhavUpreti]

Some ideas that can be considered under Platform Improvement

1. Allow users to create lists of circuits that they like and share it with others. (something like spotify playlists). We can list them on user dashboard(like we have circuits there).

2. Notify all users in a group whenever they are graded on an assignment.(this event is missing)

3. "Circuit of the Day" feature, where a different circuit is highlighted each day.

4. Circuit of month/year

• Currently Contests(wip) are automated, and are published every week. After a certain time, when this feature goes to production, we will some great circuits on the editor picks(which is good), We can then assign the most liked circuit to feature: "circuit of month "and the "circuit of the year" on the editor picks page. Grading can be most votes amongst each other.

5. Create a "Challenge of the month feature", challenges will be different than contests, in this admins can post a problem statement and receive submissions the voting however will be similar to contests.

Apart from contests, where main aim is to highlight most voted circuits, we can post monthly challenges where we ask users to submit circuits that solve real world problems, like best Circuit designs for Robotics, VR design, Smart water, Smart agriculture, Healthcare, Gaming, etc. This increases collaboration and competitions like these will generate feeds for users.

We can then present the industry best circuits as a feed to users(like linkedin/twitter feed).

7. Circuitverse feed:
   At https://circuitverse.org/feed,

• similar to linkedin feed, users can create posts.

With the Circuit Design competitions and contests, we will have a wide range of community where people share their thoughts and knowledge on the latest technologies in digital logic design. Feed will increase more user engagement.

Posts will contain hashtags: which will be the topics users can follow to fine tune their feed.
In a Post users can share

• individual circuits
• their personal collection(list) of circuits, or of someone else's
• image attachment with markdown text.

where
Posts can be-

• liked
• shared
• commented on
• resposted.

OR for starters we can just allow, the users that have won a contest/ monthly challenge to post in feed.

[vedant-jain03]

"Circuit of the Day" feature, where a different circuit is highlighted each day.

This would need high user interaction and for each day we can't decide the circuit. Although, contest feature(WIP) contains similar ideas to feature some creative creations. Contest is our experiment to have user engagement and to feature creative creation.

Circuit of month/year

We have decided to schedule the contest monthly/bi-monthly for the headstart. Although if our experiment succeed, this could be good to go for the implementation. We can entertain the "most creative circuit of the year" for now.

Create a "Challenge of the month feature", challenges will be different than contests, in this admins can post a problem statement and receive submissions the voting however will be similar to contests.

It is also a good idea and we can use testbench feature for testing with passing the testcases(similar to any coding platform ex: leetcode) but we are prioritising contest for now, as these are meant to have experiment on increasing the user engagement.

Circuitverse feed

LGTM

[Waishnav]

Here are some of the ideas in my mind to improve the CircuitVerse experience.

1. Instead of pagination in notifications and the recent circuit section, we can have an infinite scroll feature. Also, talking about recent circuits, user experience can improve if it is shown in new routes /recent-circuits
2. Also there are some UI flaws found in Dashboard UI and Search Query routes [ both users and project search ]. We can improve that user experience there.
3. Talking about UX, we need small changes in groups and assignment routes.
4. /feed route for exploring user-made public circuits. And then on we can improve search functionality.
5. Add markdown support to circuits, so that the user can explain the circuits and how it is implemented in the readme of the project.
6. Real-Time collaboration so that two or more users can work on the same circuit. But as discussed above we have not prioritized this feature. cause of server resource consumption but I still believe this feature will help users learn together.

[vedant-jain03]

Instead of pagination in notifications and the recent circuit section, we can have an infinite scroll feature. Also, talking about recent circuits, user experience can improve if it is shown in new routes /recent-circuits

will it not block footer to appear? There are +50k public circuits which can makes server slower to showup the circuits.

Also there are some UI flaws found in Dashboard UI and Search Query routes [ both users and project search ]. We can improve that user experience there.

share with us in #ux channel of slack.

Talking about UX, we need small changes in groups and assignment routes.

share with us in #ux channel of slack.

Add markdown support to circuits, so that the user can explain the circuits and how it is implemented in the readme of the project.

There is markdown support in the description editor of the project.

[Waishnav]

Will share the document on UI-UX in a day or two in slack.

will it not block the footer to appear? There are +50k public circuits which can make the server slower to show up the circuits.

As we are just changing the event of the HTTP request. (as in pagination user need to click on the button). Now we are just sending the request when the user reached at bottom of the page.
Also, the footer will be shown on the home page, as we will have a new route for this Recent Circuit section and infinite scroll on it

Or we can have a show more button at the bottom (if the infinite scroll feature is not feasible). Just like Github does you can see in the screenshot.
WDYT?

[KafilAbbasMomin]

My idea is to add the drag select in simulator.
As sometime we need to copy a part of circuit and make it again but we have to do Shift+click and select all element individually. If you can add this it will be really helpful

[Waishnav]

Yes I too found some issue in simulator as well while using it. We can have Universal mouse events. Just like figma and every other Google apps uses.
Like Ctrl + scroll to zoom in zoom out
Shift + scroll to horizontal scroll
normal scroll on only scroll.
And dragging when drag selector is on.
And section when section is used.

Actually I was working on it you can check issue and suggest any suggestions. here

[gr455]

@KafilAbbasMomin This feature already exists for the simulator, shift and drag to select area. shift + click to select individual elements. Tested for chrome

[Malavi1]

After making a few digital circuits on the CV simulator I thought this feature can enlarge the user experience and helps building digital circuits a little more constructive way.

Existing Method:

For example after taking all the required inputs ,outputs and gates if you want to increase the size of the circuit we have zoom option in the top right side corner.

But the problem with this is it zooming the entire circuit. The resultant circuit structure is also some what clumsy.

For the sake of explanation I take AND gate as an example.

screen-recording.2.webm

Proposed Method

So idea to resolve this is by making every element as individual i.e., if we add the auto resize feature to every element it will definitely gains some user experience.

It also allows to get an hands on freedom while making circuits. The previous process is some how less effective I guess.

I make sample feature using canva.com for understanding purpose.

screen-recording.1.webm

Like above shown if every element that the designer going to use have this feature it helps designers alot.

More over I don't know how to do this .But I can definitely say that if we want to proceed I will pot my 100% efforts to make it good!

ThankYou !! if have any thoughts regarding this please let me know.

[vedant-jain03]

Thanks for suggesting @Malavi1 , we will have a look on it.
cc @gr455 @pulkit-30

[Malavi1]

Thanks a million for the response

[gr455]

@Malavi1 Can you give an example of when this will provide a better experience. We have never had users complain about this.
Also, this as a project would be too small for GSoC I believe, but we may be able to do this as a part of another project if the improvements are convincing.

[Malavi1]

If the user has hands on resizing feature on the circuit elements. I am not telling that existing giving a bad experience my intention to adding makes better. I also suggested CV to a few of my friends try to make circuits on this, after I processed it.

Even small also am super happy to be part in

[GarvitSinghal47]

Title: Improving the Circuitverse Vue Simulator

Introduction:
The current Circuitverse Vue Simulator is a powerful tool that allows users to design, simulate, and share digital circuits. However, there are several areas in which the simulator can be improved to provide an even better user experience. The goal of this proposal is to address these areas and make the Circuitverse Vue Simulator even more powerful and user-friendly.

Project Description:
There are already some todo in the vue simulator and i have added some other things that need to be worked in on as they are present in the original simulator but not in the vue simulator.

The main tasks that will be addressed in this project are:

1. Integrating the Vue project into the main repository or finding a way for simulators in different repositories to work in sync.
2. API integration and testing to improve the overall performance of the simulator.
3. Implementing the feature of embedding circuits to make it easier for users to share their designs.
4. Continuing work on internationalization using Vue-i18n to make the simulator accessible to users worldwide.
5. Refactoring global stylesheets to local stylesheets for individual components and potentially removing the use of SASS to make the code more maintainable and efficient.
6. Converting Verilog Module, Quick-Button, Testbench, and Timing-Diagram to Vue components to make the simulator more modular and reusable.
7. Removing the use of jQuery from the project to improve the overall performance and security of the simulator.
8. Optimizing the simulator for mobile devices, to ensure that users can design and simulate circuits on the go as it was in the main simulator.
9. Implementing the draggability feature for individual components to make the simulator more intuitive and user-friendly.
10. Implementing a minimap feature to provide an overview of the entire circuit and make navigation easier.

These are some of the the major things that need to worked on , there are many minor issue in the simulator as well that need to be resolved.

@tachyons @vedant-jain03 @devartstar

[SaxenaAnushka102]

[Malavi1]

Hey @SaxenaAnushka102 this is not the place where you introduce your self. Org, has a dedicated communication media(slack) for that. You can hang out there people will help you to contribute.

[rakshithx09]

Hi, @tachyons.

I'm Rakshith Vijay, eager to make my first open source contribution to CircuitVerse. I admire the project and would greatly appreciate your guidance on where to start and how to contribute effectively.

Your expertise would be invaluable in helping me get involved. Looking forward to your advice.