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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

#251

Post by blululu »

malerba118 wrote: post #249
blululu wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#252

Post by malerba118 »

blululu wrote: post #251
malerba118 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#253

Post by jmole »

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…

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??”

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

#256

Post by blululu »

malerba118 wrote: post #252
blululu wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#259

Post by repiret »

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.

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.

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

#260

Post by Animats »

ur-whale wrote: post #229
Animats wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> LTSpice is not for schematic capture. It's for simulation. That may well be. IN that case, LTSpice would benefit greatly from being able to import the output of a proper schematic capture tool. If LTSpice was OpenSource, that could be added in a day of work. I love LTSpice, but the fact that 1. the software sees very little updates over time 2. it's closed source and all the cool shit that could be added to it by t…

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.

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