Propagate - A logical social media project

Construct and share logical gate schematics with your friends, or challenge them to do better! Hone your digital logic skills and design unique logic circuits, or build off other user's designs!

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Inspiration

  • Our team has a particular interest in the finer points of circuit layout, and some of us dabble in electrical engineering, despite our more abstracted Computer Science backgrounds. With the project guidelines being educational in nature, we thought there couldn't be a better time to show our love for circuit design by creating a platform that could foster STEM education in an accessible way!

What it does

  • Propagate allows for users to create accounts and design their own unique logic circuits. These designs can be saved by the user, and afterwards will appear with the main feed of the home page, where any viewer can then click on the post and open the schematic themselves! Others can then use your circuit to design their own circuit, allowing them to (theoretically) endlessly build off of each other!

How we built it

  • The bulk of the site is built with JavaScript, with an HTML frontend and responsive CSS sheets, along with a python backend. We spent a lot of time looking into JS libraries for our schematic designs, and finally decided upon GoJS as the base of our schematic editor. Keeping track of everything behind the scenes, we have a PostGres database to keep track of schematics, users and posts.

Challenges we ran into

  • Finding an adequate logic schematic library was much harder than we had initially believed it would be, and we found ourselves floundering to find our feet and get started well into Saturday.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We built a modest social media web app in just a couple days. It's incredible to think that 4 years ago none of us knew the first thing about how the internet works, but now we know enough to successfully, and without too much difficulty, build out a functioning web service
  • We found a niche and wrote a tool that can effectively help users who were formerly in our shoes, struggling through Digital Logic, and even maybe people who do this stuff for fun.

What we learned

  • Slashing features is fun and informative about what really counts in a good design

What's next for Propagate - A logical social media project

  • Our database is set up to keep track of comments, likes, and saved components on posts. We are going to implement those features, as well as a collection of components a user has either created or saved. We are also going to add the ability to add custom, black boxed components to make more complex circuits. The skeleton is there for most of that functionality, but we decided to trim it back for the presentation in order to present a more polished product. Better to leave the rough edges to the developers.
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