Schematics are for understanding what a circuit does.
Breadboards are for prototyping small low-speed circuits.
Veroboard is for prototyping larger medium-speed circuits.
Gerbers & a PCB are for production and for prototyping large or high-speed circuits.
If the tool could automatically make a 3D breadboard view from a schematic, it'd be pretty neat for beginners. If the tool warned you when the normal parasitic capacitance between breadboard rows would cause problems with a part you're using, that'd be amazing for teaching.
This is a tangent, but having worked with digital circuits for 40 years, the improvements in chips have made circuit construction -- even breadboarding -- vastly more forgiving than ever before. I've run 10 MHz clocks on breadboards and 100 MHz SPI bus on 2 layer boards that were not designed with extreme care. And, it's a fast precision ADC that's meeting its datasheet specs on that board.
No doubt the parasitics and other nasties still come into play, but it's still amazing how much faster we can go before they start to bite.
That's been a funny thing for me. I'm not an electrical engineer, at all. My electrical knowledge is an introductory electromagnetics course I had to take in college that I've mostly forgotten, reading/watching EEVblog, other internet sources, playing around with cheap and/or old parts, reading whatever I can find, etc.
I've made some retrocomputing boards (<= 50 MHz) (8051, 286, 68010, 68030, etc.) and haven't had much of a problem. No idea what the EMI looks like though. Greatest goof I had so far was an old part who's datasheet didn't mention that the signal output was open collector so I had to bodge a resistor in. Mostly just followed advice I found on the internet -> 4 layer boards can be had for very cheap these days (JLCPCB does 10 for $30 w/ ENIG boards up to 10cm x 10cm), so I followed the "just do yourself a favor and get the 4 layers boards so you can make ground and power planes" advice. Used a tool to compute minimum trace spacing to stay under a certain capacitance for a specific copper weight, board thickness, dielectric type, etc.
Probably my crowning achievement at this point is making an 1.8V LVDS to TMDS level shifter board so I can get HDMI 1.2a (4x 1.65 Gbps lanes + sidebands) out of an FPGA board I repurposed from some cryptomining hardware I bought on eBay. Had to learn how to do soldering using a stencil, paste, hot air station, and a hotplate because no one is hand soldering 0.4mm QFN packages. 0402 are the smallest thing I can do by hand.
Next thing I want to try is breaking out a small BGA. Managed to get a few Lattice iCE40HX8K's in the CT256 package (256 balls @ 0.8mm pitch BGA).
What hurts is how patent/royalty/industry interest group encumbered that nearly everything modern is. Want to do PCIe? Join PCIe SIG. Want to do USB? Join USB-IF. Want to support SD cards? Pay a bunch to SDA. Actually their patents expired so maybe you can do native SD mode now without much fear. HDMI is awful, DisplayPort requires you to join VESA, MIPI for CSI and DSI devices, etc.
"Want to do PCIe? Join PCIe SIG. Want to do USB? Join USB-IF..."
As someone who works for a large silicon vendor I can tell you that even with access to those industry groups the documentation still sucks!!!! I look at the amazing documentation available surrounding various software initiatives (OpenCV, machine learning, linux drivers, programming languages, etc...) with envy. It's all right there and out in the open with multiple blogs and forums and pages explaining shit. And actually I did try to learn PCIe. I gave up. 1000+ reference specs, about 3 random web pages and a half dozen marketing youtube video's. There's a reason why some guys manage to build niche careers around these HW topics!
I recently came across a reference manual for an SoC that came in at over 24,000 pages - a new personal record. The tools for working with such large PDFs generally suck.
I'd be so happy with a 24,000 page PDF, cause then at least you know where too look, and you can the search tool. I programme Siemens hardware and the docs I need are spread out over many tens of PDFs (of 100-1500 pages). I haven't found a proper tool than can let me search and view all this documentation properly. Best I found is ripgrep with some PDF extension to search which document I need, and then use SumatraPDF for finding the right page... ughh
Use Agent Ransack (free) or better, File Locator Pro ($69) from Mythicsoft. Both include comprehensive PDF text searching. AR includes the full functionality of FLP as a 30 day trial. Money you'll recover many times over and a product you'll be using for the rest of your life. https://www.mythicsoft.com/
In the particular case of Siemens, they already did that for you.
(Migrating from S7-300 PLCs to the current S7-1500 range, I found the complete documentation package for the 1500 universe in one whopper of a pdf. Just north of 11,000 pages IIRC.)
I shared the OPs frustration when working on the S7-300, though. The docs are excellent, there's just so many of them...
Evince on Linux is by far the best program I've found for reading large PDFs. It's worth the trouble to setup a VM or WSL just to run Evince if you're not natively on Linux.
Another terrific option is Okular. It actually has a setting to reduce memory usage on large PDF files by not prerendering pages that are not being viewed.
Eek, Okular. The one time I resorted to downgrading a package in 20+ years of using Linux. A few years back, someone drank too much design Kool-Aid and introduced smooth scrolling without making it optional. That did not get a very good reception from everyone, as browsing 20,000-page reference manuals with buttery smooth scrolling is, literally, dizzying.
I don't know if it ever got fixed. I stopped using Linux around the time when it was introduced, and having had to revert to using xpdf for browsing large PDFs like it was 1994 again was part of why I ragequit :-(.
I've never opened a 20,000 page document, but I've opened documents of several hundred pages with no noticeable issues. Pressing either Space or PgDown instantly moves the page down, no scrolling animation. The option still does not exist, but it seems that the feature doesn't exist either.
IIRC the eventual fix was to have it respect the global compositor settings, so if you have animation speed set to instant, while it does actually smooth scroll, it does so instantly. However, when it was introduced, it did not; for similar reasons (i.e. I don't like nausea), I had animations disabled, but Okular did its thing, and slowly.
It took some time for it to land though and not without the kind of discussions that you see on the Gnome bug tracker. It was pretty disheartening.
I use Evince on Linux and PDF Expert on MacOS. They both do okay, but neither does search indexing, so searching goes irritatingly slow. Also neither support the public key encrypted PDFs that a certain SoC vendor likes to give me.
SumatraPDF works far better than Firefox for me for service manuals (half a gigabyte or so usually).
It doesn't have fancy features but it's very quick to load and render.
It seems like any PDF viewer that runs in a browser just can't handle big documents and often will be terribly slow on even medium sized ones. I always have to use standalone viewers to get them to load.
I usually use SumatraPDF on Windows, it's super lightweight, fast, and can handle large documents. However, I never tried it with more than 1500 pages or so. No idea if it would survive a 24k pages PDF, would be a good test...
> "just do yourself a favor and get the 4 layers boards so you can make ground and power planes"
In general, you should avoid power planes on 4 layer boards if you can. They tend to cause a lot of trouble with return currents when signals jump from the top layer to the bottom layer through a via. Prefer using ground planes for both inner layers and make sure you have ground return vias near every signal via.
Yeah, joining the clubs is burdensome. I'm lucky to be in an industry where there's enough value-add, that we just pay the piper and move on. Myself, I buy that kind of stuff pre-integrated.
I mean, it's the same for me, I'm just on the software side of the company (mostly, I'd say systems because occasionally I have to borrow the PCIe packet analyzer to figure out why something isn't working).
The electronics are a thing I do as a hobby and I try my absolute hardest to ensure work and hobby resources are kept separate. Electronics is sufficiently different from my professional role that it doesn't feel draining as a thing to do on the side. I'm not one of those "spend 8 hours programming/architecting/designing at work only to go home and spend another 6 writing code for fun" kind of people. I definitely write software and learn at home from time to time, but the motivation for doing it on the side is certainly less than it was before I turned it into a full time job. So I tend to gravitate towards things that are interesting to me but not necessarily useful to others.
Listening to various Rick Hartley talks on youtube, I got the understanding that it was the opposite: even at slow clock rates, modern ICs cause all sorts of signal integrity and EMI issues because of very fast edge rise times.
Cannot confirm from my experience though, I don't practice EE, I just dabbble in electronics and never actually characterized SI and EMI in my creations.
You're right, the chips are not speaking 16MHz to each other. I've always revered the computing era where the electrical engineering actually mattered. Cheers.
Exactly! Allow idealized networks, but also insert reasonably sized/modeled parasitics to be inserted so you can see why your beautiful plan isn't really.
That's not just capacitances! At speed the resistance of a long trace or the inductance to a neighbor are big deals. Meanwhile the internal PCB planes of Power/Gnd are necessary low impedance bypass that no packaged cap could provide.
Schematics HAVE TO define which components are in the circuit and how they are connected (unless you really want to write net lists).
Schematics SHOULD help readers to understand what a circuit does.
Especially in, let's say, "prosumer" boards (like boards designed by small companies for hobbyists) I keep seeing schematics that are designed to make it easy for the dev to get them done and NOT to communicate the circuit theory.
It's exactly like writing code without any formatting or comments. As far as I'm concerned connecting components by net name is as bad or worse than a GOTO.
I’m not sure how valuable it would be in this case, but 3D visualisation of PCBs is extensively used in pro circuit board design. It’s very easy to place something in 2D and not realise that something will totally clash with it. Even when you have the components all set up with heights and clearance rules, it can be things like connectors where you have something blocking it so the connector is technically clear (so passes DRC) but you can’t actually plug it in because you have a big component in the way! The next level is then importing enclosures and things to make sure things fit and can actually be assembled.
It’s interesting too that there are all sorts of mistakes that become a bit more obvious when you look at it in 3D than in the 2D view.
James Cameron would like a word with you. Seriously though, 3D can show off some things that just might not be realized without it. Not sure of Fritzing's design abilities with layered PCBs, but I could imagine trying to design a layered board and forgetting how tall a component is. Seeing a component "through" the second layer could be useful
If your circuit is so complex that you need a breadboard planner and even an fully 3D visualization you have a big problem and you should not be breadboarding but ordering a PCB.
I don't have a ton of experience with teaching, but some (6 years various STEM stuff and 3 years math) and I have problem with this statement. It might SEEM easier at first glance, but this kind of interactive 3D/VR/whatever tools make much harder for students to climb up into more abstract levels. I found that it works much better than students can connect schematic with real (I really mean real) thing as early as possible.
Any recommendations for introductory level course/book? I'm a web dev and I know next to nothing about PCBs, electronics etc.
Ideally I'd like to be able to open up, say tv remote, look at the board and have at least some idea of what the top left part does vs bottom right one, that sort of thing.
The competition might look ancient, but IMO, a 2D interface would be much more productive and easier to work with. This site is completely unusable for me in Firefox (it does work in Edge though).
Yea, the whole "looks old = bad" meme rears its head again. Some of the most usable web sites in existence like Craigslist and McMaster-Carr look "old" but they do what you need them to do and do it cross-platform/cross-browser.
Indeed. Hacker news is about as responsive as the native site.
Reddit on the other hand went to being completely unusable. So much so, that I don't understand who and what motivates it to be the way it is. It's having on due to "old.reddit", but that too is a pain to use on mobile.
So many times this. There is a reason why engineers use schematics instead of assembly diagrams or renderings when designing circuits or discussing how they operate. In particular, layouts on solderless breadboards tend to become incomprehensible for any sort of even mildly complex circuit.
> layouts on solderless breadboards tend to become incomprehensible for any sort of even mildly complex circuit.
Translating non breadboard circuit schematics to a breadboard is definitely something some people struggle with, It would be useful to have a tool that could do that for you.
The tools with origins >2003 are pretty useless beyond making things out of prefab parts. That’s cool for beginner stuff, but I feel like we’re dropping people off a cliff from there. Most are really just sales platforms for parts or PCBs.
My workflow is a complicated combination of LTSpice, KiCAD, prototyping from the schematic and then ordering PCBs. It’s a little painful, but the tools are fast to use. I wish KiCAD’s SPICE integration was as natural as LTSpice and I could maintain 1 library of parts.
Breadboards are getting too painful for me to use. Too much time dealing with bad connections or noise from jumper wires being little antennas. It’s more of an issue with audio circuits than digital.
I guess my dream is if you could easily get a symbol, footprint, SPICE model, and 3D model of parts from vendors that all dropped into 1 toolchain.
Maybe a commercial offering is more like that. I’ve never really looked.
1. was OpenSource
2. would *please* switch to modern conventions for Load/Save/Cut/Paste/Undo/Redo/Exit keyboard shortcuts
3. would have a larger, *online*, library of standard parts instead of having to download every missing ones every time from random obscure places on the internet
4. had a setting for switching off showing the names of *all* the new components on the circuit
5. had a vaguely sane way to keep all the .asy and .sym files used by a .asc in the same directory
6. had a central repo of example circuits / standard circuits
7. had an API to its spice engine
It'd be the perfect tool.
But in the meantime, and in spite of its old age, it's still light-years ahead of the web-based thing from 2022
One reason is a noncritical third-party dependency; the circuit canvas will patiently wait in line to load forever until fonts.gstatic successfully loads. Normally I wouldn't post that kind of feedback here, but there's no readily apparent way to submit feedback or bug reports at the site so here we are.
Why is it even a web site? Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but this seems slow and unusable. But more importantly, I have a hard time bringing myself to trust anything that isn't saved locally.
edit: Also I feel terrible that my negative comment has any weight in this thread. I don't want to be a detractor. It's just that this is not for me.
People work hard to make things and you can't please everybody. You definitely can't please curmudgeons like me sometimes.
Yeah, so we started diode 3 months ago and in the beginning here we're focused mostly on making electronics more accessible to youth/beginners.
One major advantage of web based tools is shareability and we hope to see content creators writing articles with embedded diode projects so that tutorials can include inline interactive examples.
This is already common in the software world with tools like codesandbox and stackblitz, but not so much in the hardware world. Hardware tutorials often include fritzing diagrams, but we think the next step is interactive simulations anywhere and everywhere.
I would just like to say that this work is amazing.
I get what people are saying, but for people trying to dip their toes into electronics (and who maybe can’t afford the equipment just yet), this might be just the thing! I don’t mean to restrict the use cases, I just think a both/and world is just fine. And this is some excellent hacking.
Just don't want you to be too discouraged by the HN pile on. A lot of this is stuff to think about (and I'm sure you're doing just that!). But really, creating a new system like this is a massive achievement, and you should be proud of what you've done.
I agree with the goal, and agree with web based tooling, but the design-centric approach feels like dangling keys to keep my attention. Anyone who's attention can be captured with dangling keys doesn't have the attention to do circuits.
If you have ever used LTSpice you'd know, the "old" looking layout is not really a problem but the arcane way anything is done, different from every app I ever used.
I jump from altium to kicad to solidworks multiple times a day but the most annoying jump is when I go to ltspice and go, why is move bound to F7. I stopped even bothering to try to use hotkeys on LTspice.
The key shortcuts in ltspice are hilarious, it took a decade before I found another program that used R and E for rotate and mirror instead of right clicking in some way. I still haven't decided whether I prefer the horror of embedding models, creating single-system-only library files that I can't give to anyone, or ... it's amazing.
I'd probably pay if it was just simple to import 3rd party models, even if they're encrypted. Every time I have to screw around with some encrypted model I worry about whether it's going to end up accurate.
LTSpice is pretty great. I used it in undergrad to design and simulate a single block of CMOS memory. It was a little tough getting going, but once I figured things out it was a great experience.
I just started using LTSpice a few days ago. It's pretty arcane for sure but at least it's consistent. The tool is really not that complicated at all. Its value seems to be in its simulation capabilities as well as its selection of standard components. It does crash here and there, though, but I haven't lost any work yet.
Well, yes. LTSpice is not for schematic capture. It's for simulation. If you have to do power supply design, LTSpice lets you almost get it right before you order parts.
Here's one of mine.[1] I built that, and it works pretty much the same as the simulation does. Except for the depletion-mode FET current limiter. The resistor that sets the current limit had to be adjusted after building to get the same current limit as the simulation.
LTSpice doesn't help with layout. I had to follow the layout instructions in the switcher control data sheet to get it to work. Some of those paths have to be very short.
You usually use LTSpice only to simulate difficult analog parts of a circuit. Not the whole thing.
The important part is the device models that simulate components.
Those do get updated as new analog ICs come out. It's finding a good model that's hard. Linear Technology keeps the models updated for their own parts, but you have to look around on the Web for many non-LT parts.
Agreed. I can't figure out for the life of me how to move this LED upward in the Z direction. Or bend the pins so I can plug the LED into 2 different Arduino pins e.g. GND and A0. I have the same problem with most 3D software, I have a 2D mouse and it's a fundamentally inadequate human interface device to manipulate things in 3 dimensions.
Yeah on my machine it's a lot slower using Firefox than chrome. We can investigate and see why it's happening.
Also I do agree that 2D interface is probably important to add at some point too!
I think right now the skeuomorphism is nice for folks wanting to get their hands dirty with circuit projects but don't have all the materials/supplies available for whatever reason (cost/space/etc)
3d opens up a few extra possibilities for us, but i think there's definitely advantages to 2d as well and seeing every solder joint on the arduino board is just a waste of cpu/memory at the moment. We have some camera presets that let you position the camera directly overhead for a top-down view which effectively is a 2d building experience. We might create a dedicated 2d view if there's enough demand for it!
The overhead view might not be enough. Performance issues aside, if I take your sample and rotate the camera to the overhead view, the wires that power the Arduino overlap in a kinda confusing way. It’s even worse if you swap them around, with the wire colors randomly mixing in the middle (but it is also broken when looking at it from the side). A 2D-first design wouldn’t need to worry about it, but it would instead route the wires in a way that avoids overlapping wherever possible (and two parallel wires would be quite trivial).
And on the good software the 2D interfaces take customizable color parameters, any level detail you like 3D files, customizable fonts.
Just take 20 minutes to customize a settings file and reuse for every new project after, iterating as you go and you'll get yourself pretty realistic outputs long term.
On Chrome on 2019 MBP, nothing loads until 5secs later. Zooming lags 2+ secs. Probably only good for making a presentation on a beefy machine, not useable otherwise.
Do you perhaps have "Advanced Security" mode enabled, where JIT is disabled for new sites? Site was super jank at first but once I added it to my exception list it was buttery on my M1.
Hey! Would love to investigate and see why this isn't working for you. Any more info on your OS/specs/browser version or what exactly isn't working? Should work on chrome.
latest linux chrome Version 108.0.5359.124 (Official Build) (64-bit) on ubuntu latest LTS, directly from google (not in a snap). Starts up but central window just has a rotating loading icon that never goes away
Sometimes in tech we don’t do a good job of recognizing that a problem is essentially “solved” and further “innovation” isn’t helping. The reason why stuff looked like “it was made in 2003” was because that essentially solved the problem. All the extra iterations on top of that arguably didn’t help.
A lot could be said of many forms of web design too. The basic designs of the late 90s and early 2000s were very functional. A lot of the junk out there today looks flashy but is borderline terrible at actually communicating easily navigable information. There are good exceptions today, and to my point those are broadly things that didn’t try and reinvent the wheel through unnecessary “innovation” in “design.”
This is a bad take - most UIs from that era are objectively worse, and most of the good ones have been carried forwards and incorporated into newer versions.
With old software, you have a lot of experimental ideas that make it into prod. Want properties on this item? Sorry, right click rotates the component. Click the component and press P instead.
Today, at least in the professional software world, UIs are better than they’ve ever been and the programs are capable of infinitely more. And in 20 years we’ll be looking back on this era the same way: “What do you mean you can’t see an AR preview of this component you’re working on?“ “You had to label each wire of the I3C bus by hand??”
Aesthetics aside, we're interweaving a wasm port of ngspice with a microcontroller simulator and running realtime simulations all in the browser which i would say is innovative in several ways
The simulator under the hood is cool - someone even got a component to smoke. But the post leads with a pretty condescending title that focuses on aesthetic motivations by dumping (superficially) on everything else. Naturally people are going to focus on the usability of the interface and unfortunately it is really hard to use. Gratuitous 3D is not a good design choice for a number of reasons that others have elaborated in great detail.
Hard to use? what do you mean, you drag parts around and then you click a simulate button, that's it. You think configuring a transient analysis with 8 parameters is easier? I'm sure it's easy for people who are already familiar with it. But face it, no high schooler is going to be itching to start an electrical engineering career because they got their hands on a spice simulator.
Yeah it’s hard to use. It’s hard to drag parts around in 3D space with a 2D mouse. There are tons of ambiguities about targeting/accordances. A 2d orthocam view looking down on the bread board would be much easier to see and manipulate. There are several posts outlining issues with usability on this thread already. I think that the product is compelling but the interface still needs some work if it is going to be an improvement over 2004.
Indeed it's hard to drag things around in 3d which is why we restrict movement of parts to the XZ plane effectively making it a 2d editor in a 3d viewer.
Yeah. 3D view navigation is generally tricky with mouse/keyboard. The way it is setup here is good. The problems come in when there are also interactive elements in the view and this leads to a lot of usability issues. The mouse click/drag operation is overloaded and no feedback is provided to disambiguate different modes.
A few quick issues that I encounter with this (in trying to build a basic waveform generator):
* At a slant angle view a lot of components are blocked and cannot be clicked, one must change the view in order to target them.
* There is no feedback provided to disambiguate between when the mouse will engage in camera/view navigation vs component translation.
* No feedback is given in the hover state to let the user know when component they are targeting. (I frequently moved the whole breadboard by mistake).
* Component placement is very hard. The holes are small and all look the same. Offering some feedback about which holes would be connected would be much easier to use.
* Connections are hard to ascertain. Sometimes this requires a change of views, but also the bread board get cluttered. Offering some visual affordance for the connections could help make this superior to a physical equivalent and also remove the requirement for tacit knowledge (most people don't know how the rows/columns of a breadboard are connected.
* Wires get tangled. They currently take a linear path (in XY) between the two connections. Some research has shown that using curved paths is easier for the eye to follow (so something like a smooth step). Alternative offering some ability for the user to push/pull them apart or edit a bezier path might help her).
* Components have no flexibility. One must use wires to get the correct circuit topology which complicates things visually/ interactively.
Again I want to be clear that I think that this technology is really interesting and it has a lot of promise - especially since it is a pure web stack. I also think that it is not yet at the stage where it can arrogantly mock its rivals for using 15 year old UI component libraries.
We thrive on novelty, especially people drawn to tech. With the pace of change in the early years of modern tech, making things constantly change appearance was natural and unavoidable, so we've come to expect it, but some things are eventually good enough. Chairs, sinks, toilets, plates-- there may be edge cases of radical divergences from their settled forms, but for the most part, they're stable and consistent.
This illustrates a problem with many "modern" applications. My first impression: "Oh, that looks nice. Looks like in real life". Then I tried using it and found that it is clunky and slow to the point it is barely usable and I would much faster build the real circuit on a real breadboard instead.
Exactly. I was seeing a friend the other day who was using an ancient version of mastercam, version 8 I think. I looked at it and thought wow I need to update him to a later version. However after watching him use it it just all made sense. There were a few areas that could be improved, but it was so simple and clear to use.
I'd like to see a study done of this kind of application, but removing all slowness. Perhaps you could run it on a $10k gaming rig, or pre-render all interactions or something to make all reactions instant.
That should inform us of the real value of a lifelike 3D UI, separately from the effects of the jankiness that normally accompany them.
This specific circuit simulator does have some performance-related jank, but even if you ignore it, you can easily see where it breaks down, for example:
* If you look at the black/red wires going to the Arduino, they kind of overlap
* If you swap the black/red wires (so that one of them has a shorter distance to cover), you get visual artifacts
* It is trivial to make a wire unconnected while moving it to another hole (and instead just touching the plastic parts of the breadboard)
* Making even the most trivial modifications (eg. putting 5V directly through the diode) requires a lot of dragging, rotating, panning, and zooming to get it done (but hey, at least there’s smoke if you actually do that)
* There are many things that can go wrong, because the developers didn’t think about it; for example, the bottom power rails of the breadboard don’t actually work
* Making a modification to a running circuit is impossible, and switching between design and simulation modes takes time and does not always remember the camera position
All of those aren’t a problem in a 2D simulator. Some of them because the 2D simulator abstracts some things away better (eg. power sources or wires), some of them because the developers could invest more effort in the simulation logic, and some of them because the 3D simulator does a bad job at the real-life parts of it (eg. overlapping wires or putting the connector inside the hole).
Just wondering can Multisim integrate seamlessly with Ultiboard for circuit emulation since both of them now under NI? I know that Proteus simulator can perform the emulation to some extent.
For reference, here is a circuit simulator that was ported from a 2005 project and it is 2D. It also visualizes the voltage and current as speed and density of electron packets flowing through the circuit:
I use this a lot for quickly testing things out when I am not entirely sure what I need. It's incredibly powerful, and give you scopes so you can verify things work. It may be very old and look ancient by modern standards but it's much more usable for me. Also I don't need sonmething to simulate an Arduino, I need something to say test a op-amp summing amplifier.
I was trying to rig a feedback loop between a lamp and a photoresistor but it isn't working. Do you know if the photoresistor actually reads in light generated by other circuit components, or is it just supposed to simulate a variable resistor responding to light from outside the circuit?
I've contributed quite a lot to Paul's simulator, including doing the port so it runs natively in the browser.
The photoresistor is just controlled by the slider in the side-bar. It doesn't respond to lights in the circuit. There is an "optocoupler" under "active building blocks" that does connect optically.
I've seen a few requests to add feedback that occurs outside the electrical domain - light is one, but also for mechanical movement (motors that turn generators). But, I pesonally think it's hard to know how to model all these non-electrical interactions in a way that is visually clear and effective.
Thanks for your contributions. I played circuit.js obsessively during high school (as well as some of the other simulators). It was just way more intuitive than spice. I picked up Art of Electronics around that time.
Ten years later, just the other day I was using it to prototype some filter and resonator circuits.
I also wish someone would revitalize falstad circuit sim (http://falstad.com/circuit/), which is still I think the best tool for experimentation with analog electronics. Just a little bit better interface and user friendliness and it would be amazing!
A somewhat more robust numerical backend (that can give error guarantees) would also be nice, you kind of have to tinker with time steps in some cases.
I did the port of Paul's sim so that it runs natively in the browser instead of needing a Java plug-in (remember them) and made various other contributions.
I haven't contributed for a couple of years, but Paul still actively maintains it.
Do you have specific ideas on what would be changed to "revitalize" it? I agree the UI is kind of basic (it could do with a pallet of common components), but I still like the productivity of it.
Well, first, thanks so much for your work it's really one of the most useful tools on the internet imo. I'm not super qualified to critique it, specially the interface. (but I think it works well as is!)
I had a look back at it and see many great new features.
(1) I think it's awesome that you can program javascript inputs (and there's AVR8js). But it's not really user friendly: maybe there could be some editor window or something you could program js in with syntax highlighting
I think that's what would be most significant contribution for me, because there are quite a few prototypes where you want to mix analog/digital and that's currently difficult.
(2) If you want to get really fancy, look at editor.p5.js interface (although in terms of self-documentation[1], I think circuitjs is better!). The cloud save functionality could be really useful (although I'd understand if you find it out of scope).
(3) Maybe the time step could adjust automatically as an option? (Something like: auto step -- simulate at half speed and check the difference between the two simulations; if significant, improve accuracy until it reaches maximum; I'm sure there could be better approaches though like trying to find maximum resonance frequencies)
(4) An easy way to run it offline? I think since it's already a web app and it's very light, an electron app distribution would be nice (although HN notoriously cringes at electron :P ).
[1] I define self-documentation as the ability to find functionality and documentation within a user interface. That's easier done with GUIs where commands and references should be a few clicks away, though it can also be done in text interfaces with help commands and such.
Indeed, mixed signal simulations would be very useful, I reckon, for people dealing with sensors and that kind of stuff. Might as well simulate it before building it. It's currently possible with falstad's open source code base as well, you just have to program inputs and outputs but it's not very ergonomical let's put it that way.
In any case, I always encourage trying to be as open as you can with the software, this encourages collaboration/cooperation (and of course is just better for everyone, in most cases!).
I think (like others here) any slightly more advanced user would be more comfortable/productive in a 2D interface most of the time. But the option of having 3D for blinkenlights is sure nice :)
(also a great accessibility for people who can't afford to buy hardware for learning and experimentation but have access to a computer)
If you haven't tried micro-cap, I'd recommend checking it out. It became free a few years ago when the company liquidated, and it's orders of magnitude more powerful than LTspice (and quite a bit more intuitive, but still not great). Don't expect any updates though.
3d does present some additional challenges, but we decided to go this route to reduce friction for beginners who might not understand how schematics or other abstract representations map to the real world circuits they're playing with
I'm still not sure what the 3D aspect in particular adds, though. Tools which work with physical wiring diagrams, like Fritzing, have been available for ages, and I don't think the 2D nature of those tools has ever been a meaningful obstacle to understanding.
a) You want to check that your components won't physically bash into something else you care about
b) You are designing something that operates at RF to mm-wave frequencies and need to worry (a lot) about the spatial location of the high-frequency components and nearby conductors / ground planes
c) You want to get an idea about airflow and heat dissipation on power electronics and/or modules (such as power amplifiers) that come with their own heatsinks (some SIPs do!)
Kicad and other bits of more hobby-orientated software that do a 3D render (such as diptrace) tend to do it for reasons (a) and (c). Software that does (b) properly costs hundreds of thousands of €$£ per year to rent and tends to have a UI that makes you scream with frustration at every possible moment.
Those are all good reasons to use 3D capabilities in a more capable tool, but none of them apply here. "Diode" doesn't even check for collisions between parts -- it'll happily let you stick a DIP 555 "inside" another 555, for example -- and it certainly doesn't do any RF or thermal simulation.
maybe you should spend your time writing software that teaches the beginners how to read schematics, thus enabling them to make progress toward their presumed goal of understanding and designing circuits, instead of giving them additional handicaps to overcome, such as having to use a user interface that is as confusing as a breadboard (if not more so, if the comments indicating that the pin-1 indicators are missing from the simulated chips are correct; in my browser the app wouldn't even load)
or at least software that gives you an error message when it fails instead of a blank white page
As someone who teaches electronics to people who are purely into it for the practical parts (artists) I think one of the main beginner challenges in electronics is the translation between the different representations of a circuit.
Going from a schematic to a breadboard, going from a breadboard to a stripboard or from a schematic to the actual PCB/IC is hard if you never have done it. It is like showing someone who has never seen written language a book and trying to make them understand that the signs map to spoken language somehow.
Groking that takes some time.
For that matter I think choosing the breadboarded representation of a circuit (in 3D!) for a simulation program is not really a good choice. For beginners it might seem like a good choice, but it prevents them from becoming accustomed to the schematics they will encounter everywhere. For more advanced people it is too clunky (schematics just are superiour for reasoning about circuits).
So far the best and most usable simulator I have come across is circuit.js by Paul Falstad. It has some circuits where the simulated circuit does not match reality at all (e.g. a CMOS-Inverter based relaxation oscillator), but it is extremely usable.
The best tool I ever used to learn about circuits was a Radio Shack electronics kit. It was something I could pick away at for years as kid, and eventually develop an intuitive sense for reading a schematic.
Completely agree. This was my first practical kit. I bought one recently from John Lewis in the UK and they are very under-rated. A few $ worth of components but most importantly, a neat paper booklet with a tonne of example circuits including how to wire them on the spring posts.
I would always recommend this as a start for young children before then going back to some theory and "why did this circuit behave this way"
This is a great technical demonstration of how to visualize a circuit board. But I would rather walk over hot coals than try to actually design a circuit using this interface. Circuits can be represented very nicely in two dimensions, which is convenient given that computer screens are two dimensional. For things which are fundamentally 3D (e.g. models of objects) it can be useful for design purposes to have a 3D visualization, but this doesn't seem to be the case with circuits.
This spent thirty seconds with a spinning loading icon, switched my graphics card to the discrete graphics card, and then Firefox hard crashed to desktop. I think I prefer the 2003-era designs.
This is great for learning - you should consider a mode that switches to traditional schematic view so people can understand the corresponding circuit.
I believe another web-based tool which can do this already is https://www.flux.ai
I've noodled around with it and I like it, but I actually find working with pencil, paper, and the actual components to be more efficient than panning and zooming around a 3d environment. It's not always an option so these simulators are very useful, but I've come to realize I'm far better off by planning not to use these tools, I guess.
I’m realizing I didn’t give flux the credit I should have. I actually interviewed to work on it because as far as I can tell, this stuff is the future. So that aside, it doesn’t fit my workflow well today but I don’t doubt that it will, and for many people it already does.
I’m glad to hear good things are coming! I’ll definitely keep checking in. Apologies for being dismissive of the hard work your team does, especially after seeing the kinds of technical challenges you take on and working with similar technologies myself these days.
High performance, user-friendly collaborative tools in the browser are not a free lunch, and what flux does today is already impressive.
Thanks for the kind words…it’s a true labor of love
Also no hard feelings…I agree that we are early and that there is still a lot of work ahead of us.
Schematic UX hasn’t gotten as much love as it needs because there was so much other stuff to figure out first…we just needed something that worked in the very early days
And now we get to come back to it and make things like wiring truly great
Noted. I guess in the future I will continue to look for things made in 2003, because this is entirely useless for any actual circuit simulation and/or design.
Looks great if you're trying to impress some of your beginner friends, though.
It sure is pretty, but there's a critical issue. Components can have their pins labeled, but this is done in the 3D environment. Just place them down on the right side. There's plenty of white space there. No one wants to rotate a component around like that and strain their head to read. I'm literally just going to pull up Google and get the schematic there. You have the information but it is displayed in a way that is hostile to the user. I can't even see where pin 1 is without this view because there's no marker like we'd see on a standard real life component.
Great feedback, we've chatted a bit about this internally already. It's something we'll likely add. In general we're looking for ways to make it easier to see pinouts/voltages/current/etc.
For a nice, polished, non-skeuomorphic circuit simulator, see iCircuit [1], which provides native MacOS and iOS clients (based on the Falstad JS circuit simulator mentioned elsewhere in this thread, if I recall correctly). It differs from most SPICE-based simulators in that there is no edit or run mode - the circuit is always simulating in transient mode so updates happen in real time.
what I really want is a circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 02003 because it looks like it was made in 01963
the aesthetics and clarity of the schematics of a tektronix oscilloscope manual from 01963 plus the instant responsivity of the actual 01963 tektronix oscilloscope; but married with the flexibility, generality, reproducibility, and monte carlo capabilities you can get out of modern teraflops desktop hardware, with the scriptability of emacs and the breadth of simulation models you can get in ltspice, and of course not limited to 10 megahertz
i guess it's true that this simulator doesn't look like it was made in 02003 because, after taking several minutes to load, it just displays a blank white page with buttons that don't do anything
circuit simulators almost never did that in 02003, though i guess berkeley spice sort of does until you read its man page
apparently from the other comments it's supposed to be a thing with some kind of 3-d model of a breadboard though? why would you want that? the reason we usually draw schematics before putting together breadboards, and we show each other schematics instead of breadboards, is because breadboards are a terrible user interface for circuits; schematics are much easier to understand because you can organize your components logically instead of being constrained by how things are packaged, and also you can tell what the components are by looking at them
let me recommend a circuit simulator which, though lacking in some ways (especially realistic component simulation and integration with spice and kicad), takes advantage of the possibilities of computers to do better than paper schematics instead of worse: http://falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html
This seems pretty cool, esp for a newbie to know how to put down a circuit.
I use http://www.circuitlab.com and find it to be quite good for laying down parts and doing simulation including time-dependence and with parameters. Very reasonably priced IMO.
UI needs a lot of work to make basic tasks easier.
I started from scratch and managed to build a simple blinking LED using a 555 but found the general process far more fiddly than need be. Took me almost 10 minutes to do what should have been seconds. Took me longer to do than it would have with a real breadboard in real life, which makes this thing a miss.
Placing components correctly and in particular rotating components is very difficult. Running wires one end and at a time rather than just a click and drag felt very fiddly.
Thing feels like a tech demo, not something I would hand a learner.
Nice touch that you can fry a LED, but unfortunately I couldn't get the Arduino to fry; it's the expensive part and the one I would want to run a simulation to make sure I will not destroy.
Dan Luu speaks eloquently and at length about how better options are needed for logic design. I would recommend both of the above to the enthusiastic novice.
For me, circuit simulator / schematic capture tool (you can not have former without latter effectively, nobody creates netlists in text editor now) which look modern will use modern conventions about mouse and keyboard, which is well-known to anybody who tried at least one graphical editor.
You now, left (primary) click for select, click-hold-and-move to move, right (secondary) click for context menu, this kind of stuff.
Many PCB/Schematics/Simulation packages uses their own old conventions, which are alien to modern users, like "you must have to choose move tool, click on symbol, move, click to drop in new place" and so on.
3D, skeuomorphism, etc., looks nice in tutorials with 3-10 parts but are unusable after that.
Since the title refers to how it looks, this thing looks more like a toy than a tool. Also, as far as it's up to me, I'll never use an app that requires me to “sign in”. I prefer to own the apps I use and retain full control over my data.
Looks very nice, but on my old PC with my new 4k monitor it is unusable. It would be cool if it could render at half resolution (quarter the number of pixels) during animation and only when animation ends render one frame at full resolution.
I am looking for something similar to this for a Raspberry Pi and Python. To allow students to work with the circuits/electronics without having to buy the hardware. Raspis are expensive now because of the microprocessor shortage.
How will Diode differentiate itself from TINA? They have 3D breadboard, web browser, microcontroller code simulation, PCB layout, equation extraction, etc.
presumably melony already knew that because ngspice is mostly licensed under a 3-clause bsd license which says
> Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
unless you're violating the ngspice license? or the documentation and/or other materials are just hard to find?
parts of ngspice are also licensed under gplv2, cc-by-sa-4.0, lgpl-2.1+, or gpl2+, but maybe you aren't using those parts
Melony is not that pedantic and melony does not ask questions whose answers melony already know. Melony has better things to do than to hound SaaS services over alleged license violations (unlike a certain somebody).
perhaps if melony didn't know that, it is evidence that the required credit is, in effect, not being given; that the authors of this software are, in effect, passing off the work of the ngspice contributors as their own
That's so cool that there's a web version now! I was introduced to multisim back in high-school and enjoyed that unit a lot, will play around with it on the weekend :)
Would be cool if it worked, unfortunately the "Hello World" (pressing the button to toggle the LED) already fails on my rather high-end system (and Firefox). Surely there is room for optimization as well.
In terms of usability, the value I see is from being able to immediately recognize the various physical parts that one might find in their Arduino starter toolbox. For actual editing, I would prefer a different interface however.
I don't think it is specific to Gen Z - it is common for any young people to seek novelty for the sake of novelty (and have bias against anything old). To some extent it is an implementation of explore-exploit strategy - one can try many different things when young and then settle on best seen things becoming older.
The problem is that we cannot have usable GUI because GUI designers just cannot stop trying new things inflicting on everyone constant churn.
Not sure how this is better than a simulator from 2003.
Or even earlier for that matter.
When this can do what LTSpice can do and show a nice 3D simulation with all the voltages in realtime at each node if one wants to see said simulation instead of traces, then yeah it'll be an improvement.
This is very cool, though as others have said it is fairly resource intensive.
I'd love to see a schematic exported or even shown as you press simulate (you clearly have it the components and links in memory somewhere to do the simulation). This would be great for debugging.
This looks amazing and some of you really need to stop yelling at clouds. Not everything needs to be “boring and functional”, it’s ok for things to be just fun.
That's where the whole thing falls apart with these things usually. Oscillators are quite difficult to simulate because they require less than ideal startup conditions i.e. noise, voltage gradients to get going. While the SPICE engine underneath does support that, you can't really expect someone wiring up a breadboard to be completely aware of the nuances around simulation vs reality.
for anyone looking for something like this, especially for teaching - TinkerCAD has a circuits app that is extremely similar but without the janky 3D. https://www.tinkercad.com/circuits
I'm sorry about all the negativity in the comments. What I see is something that was handcrafted with the careful touch of a craftsperson that represents your individual vision for a specific digital experience. I can tell you put a lot of time into making this. Thank you for sharing this!
please take the smoothing out. The smoothing of camera rotation, the smoothing of leds changing state... so annoying you cant try things like quickly pressing button or such
Breadboards are for prototyping small low-speed circuits.
Veroboard is for prototyping larger medium-speed circuits.
Gerbers & a PCB are for production and for prototyping large or high-speed circuits.
If the tool could automatically make a 3D breadboard view from a schematic, it'd be pretty neat for beginners. If the tool warned you when the normal parasitic capacitance between breadboard rows would cause problems with a part you're using, that'd be amazing for teaching.