101–110 of 270 posts
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 teraflop…
This looks amazing, but I wish the UI would have been a little more light-weight. I'm running on 100% CPU in Chromium on my Thinkpad X220.
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…
thanks for the plug!
We are working on making our schematic editor so good...you'll never go back to paper :)
Pretty cool, though I would say that a breadboard is probably a worse UI for capturing circuits than whatever we had in 2003. But it is fair that e.g. LTspice has a terrible GUI. I always thought QUCS had the best UI of all the free options: https://qucs.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html Unfortunately it's not the most popular project.
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
or at least software that gives you an error message when it fails instead of a blank white page
Ah skeuomorphism my old friend. So good to see you!
Are there any inductors or transformers? I don't see any on the left parts panel. I want to make an oscillator.
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. This got to a point that Bob Pea…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. I tip my mouse to you.
Thanks, appreciate the kind words! It's been challenging to say the least, but that's half the fun.
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 capa…
Maybe a checkbox to "show parasitic components".
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.
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: https://www.falstad.com/circuit/ Maybe a similar sort of visualization could be used for this project? It is neat that it can simulate arduino uno code to pulse IO, as an in-simulation workbench.
Are you using SPICE for the actual simulation?
Hey! I work on Diode w/ Austin (OP). Yeah we use a wasm-compiled version of ngSpice for the circuit simulation.
> 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