Export a project to .zip, start a new project, import the zip: the circuit
comes back and the board does not. Two reporters; the second noticed it "only
works with wokwi components", which is the shape of it — the passives are real
Wokwi part types and survive, the board was not one.
The bug was in the EXPORT, not the import. wokwiZip knew four boards and wrote
`wokwi-arduino-uno`/`uno` for anything else, while the connections kept the
board's real canvas id. The attached repro says so in six lines: parts declare
an `uno`, connections name `esp32`.
Of those four, only two round-tripped. 'arduino-mega' was missing from the
export's board-id test, so a Mega's wires named `arduino-mega` while its part
was `mega`. 'raspberry-pi-pico' was tested against 'nano-rp2040', an id nothing
has been issued since boards became instances, and the import mapped it back to
the same dead string. Nobody noticed because the module had no tests.
"Velxio has four boards" was written down five times: two tables in the export,
one in the import, a hand-copied union in the import dispatcher, and BoardType
in the store — which setBoardType already ignored, casting to BoardKind to do
its job. All five are gone, plus BOARD_FQBN and BOARD_LABELS, two more from the
same era that nothing imported.
A board may claim a Wokwi part type only when a Wokwi element draws it. That is
not a preference: connections carry PIN NAMES, and the names a wire carries are
whatever the element on the canvas calls its pins. Those four render through
wokwi-elements, so an Uno wire says `GND.2`, `A4`, `5V` and the file opens over
there. Every other board renders through a velxio-* element with our names —
ours calls a pin `34` where Wokwi's esp32-devkit-v1 calls it `D34` — so
claiming a Wokwi board for one would produce a file that loads in Wokwi and
attaches every wire to a pin that does not exist. They travel as
`board-velxio-<kind>`, which also round-trips the overlay's kinds, runtime
strings this module cannot enumerate.
Nothing is coerced any more. An unrecognised diagram returns a null board and
says so instead of answering 'arduino-uno'; a second board in the diagram is
reported rather than dropped; wires naming a part the diagram lacks are called
out, which is what the reporter's own file now does when you import it.
Two more halves surfaced only by driving the real editor:
The board was still missing after import, because setBoardType re-kinds the
ACTIVE board and a new project has none — nothing to re-kind, so the circuit
arrived without its chip exactly as reported. The importers now add a board
when there is none, activate it (addBoard promotes but does not sync the flat
legacy fields), and retarget the wires to the id the board actually got.
And the export read `boardType`, the flat mirror, which only tracks the active
board through setActiveBoardId/setBoardType and reports every Raspberry Pi as
an 'arduino-uno' on purpose. It now reads the board itself, so the kind and the
canvas id come off one object and cannot disagree.
Adversarial review of the fix caught six more, every one reproduced.
The worst was not a loss but a corruption, and it was mine: a canvas with two
boards wrote BOTH boards' wires against the exported board's part id, because
for every non-Arduino family that id IS the first-of-kind canvas id. The second
board's components came back attached to the first board's pins — a different
circuit, from a file that was internally consistent, so nothing complained. My
first attempt at a dangling-wire warning could not see it either: it allowed
the board KIND as a defined id, which is precisely the id a second board
writes. The check now reads the raw diagram, the export leaves other boards'
wires out rather than mis-addressing them, and it says what did not travel.
The rest: isKnownBoardKind used `in`, so 'toString' and '__proto__' passed a
guard whose input comes from files people send each other; the importer's
extension list admitted only the Arduino four, so a MicroPython project came
back with an empty editor; the exporter never wrote libraries.txt though the
importer has always read it and offered to install what it finds; and the
unknown-board message claimed the circuit landed on the current board without
retargeting its wires there.
41 tests, over every board kind, which is the assertion this module never had:
it was written when Velxio had four boards and nothing failed when it grew to
thirty. Verified in a real browser through the reporter's flow — build the
circuit, File > Export, new project, import — for arduino-uno (unchanged),
arduino-mega and raspberry-pi-pico (both previously broken) and esp32/esp32-s3.
Before and after are identical in all five.
Still lossy, and out of scope here: a .zip carries one board, so a multi-board
project must be saved as .vlx to survive whole. Wire waypoints, one shade of
green, and board-level state (boardOptions, SPIFFS, languageMode) do not travel
either.
David Montero Crespo