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A circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 2003

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Re: A circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 2003

#241

Post by lb1lf »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #184
tda wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 SumatraPD…

How about joining all the PDFs together and doing ctrl-F? Sounds like it could save you the grep step.

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...

Re: A circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 2003

#242

Post by malerba118 »

JCM9 wrote: post #238

“Doesn’t look like it was made in 2003.” 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…

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

Re: A circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 2003

#243

Post by auxym »

analog31 wrote: post #87
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #30

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…

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 an…

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.

Re: A circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 2003

#244

Post by auxym »

synack wrote: post #144
repiret wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Sumatra PDF on windows is very fast.

I like it so much in fact that I've been looking for a linux alternative and haven't been satisfied yet. I will try evince though.

Re: A circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 2003

#245

Post by physPop »

malerba118 wrote: post #242
JCM9 wrote: post #238

“Doesn’t look like it was made in 2003.” 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…

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

That's like saying "we're making it less performant and more fragile on purpose"

Re: A circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 2003

#246

Post by blululu »

malerba118 wrote: post #242
JCM9 wrote: post #238

“Doesn’t look like it was made in 2003.” 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…

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.

Re: A circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 2003

#247

Post by malerba118 »

physPop wrote: post #245
malerba118 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's like saying "we're making it less performant and more fragile on purpose"

We envision it going more like this:

"here's an interactive simulation to illustrate my point "

instead of:

"to see my point please download these files, download this version of ltspice, and then give it a run"

Re: A circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 2003

#248

Post by wellanyway »

obscurette wrote: post #174
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because why do we need 3D? Teaching is much easier when the students can connect the abstract representation to something they can experience.

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 p…

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.

Re: A circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 2003

#249

Post by malerba118 »

blululu wrote: post #246
malerba118 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 elabora…

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.
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