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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Downvoters must read first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_(electronics)
So you are saying they should have ended the post with JK?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/D274D-SN74H74N-Flip-Flops-Dual-D-Ty...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Downvoters must read first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_(electronics)
Yeah, I got the joke. I was (and still am) tempted to downvote though because puns and pun chains are low effort and reddit-esque. "What you posted didn't register at first", "I'll have to think about that for a bit", "Why can't we post flip flop puns? This community is too gated ", etc.
I'm super stoked that hardware / EE is getting so much more focus and interest from software engineers. It really feels like there is so much room for improvement / optimization in that space and for so many years, it was like this black box that nobody wanted to look inside.
Old tools were inaccessible to use because there's nothing to look at with a text-based tool, and inaccessible for engineers to develop because programming was so arcane. Look at Berkeley spice written in C. It's a lot of old-school parsing and implementing matrix methods.
The new stuff that's more accessible to use is more accessible for a software engineer to develop, but it's arguably even less accessible to other engineers and scientists to add their contributions. This creates an issue where the tools remain as good-looking toys that never get any serious technical chops.
Splitting the implementation is the way to go, but neither side would be happy about the interface. There's also the issue of platform because good engineering tools only run locally.
I don't know what the answer is, but it's not Python. We already have python, and yet, there isn't an explosion of collaboration to make great tools for the physical sciences and engineering. It's too much of a compromise for both sides.
Circuit simulators are awesome, but they never go the next step such that they work with actual purchasable components. The user always has to read datasheets and translate everything into spice parameters. Also, they typically don't allow the user to specify maximum power for every component and check that the voltages and currents are within safe limits.
This "next step" is really on the vendor/manufacturer instead of simulator developers. It won't be addressed, either, because it's extra development and cost for the vendor to bare when a lot of low cost/generic applications won't benefit from having simulation files. Additionally, it's a lot more work for the vendor to characterize and also guarantee that their products are close in value after years of production.…
The website however is now dead, but thanks to the Internet Archive we can still access it to download the software.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220117133700/http://www.spectr...
That software would be a great candidate for a crowdfunding campaign to purchase the source rights from the author and release it as Open Source.
Edit: and it works great with WINE under Linux.
Circuit simulators are awesome, but they never go the next step such that they work with actual purchasable components. The user always has to read datasheets and translate everything into spice parameters. Also, they typically don't allow the user to specify maximum power for every component and check that the voltages and currents are within safe limits.
This "next step" is really on the vendor/manufacturer instead of simulator developers. It won't be addressed, either, because it's extra development and cost for the vendor to bare when a lot of low cost/generic applications won't benefit from having simulation files. Additionally, it's a lot more work for the vendor to characterize and also guarantee that their products are close in value after years of production.…
Which is exactly why the simulator/community should address it.
Many years ago I helped write https://www.multisim.com It's a full SPICE based simulator done entirely clientside
Cool, thank you for sharing. I am interested in simulators, especially in simulators of analogue circuits. Do you have any recommendations on where to start reading about algorithms that lie at the core of simulators? Also, how was the experience developing such product with JS?
The JS experience wasn't great. We used emscripten and the tooling barely worked for the simulator core. The rest of the app wasn't bad, but we used polymer / webcomponents which was a big mistake IMO
Many years ago I helped write https://www.multisim.com It's a full SPICE based simulator done entirely clientside
It looks nice but Jesus... $1550AUD a year for the designer edition?
I'm super stoked that hardware / EE is getting so much more focus and interest from software engineers. It really feels like there is so much room for improvement / optimization in that space and for so many years, it was like this black box that nobody wanted to look inside.
In my opinion, the next step is to figure out a good way to combine something like gnu octave with nice modern GUIs. Old tools were inaccessible to use because there's nothing to look at with a text-based tool, and inaccessible for engineers to develop because programming was so arcane. Look at Berkeley spice written in C. It's a lot of old-school parsing and implementing matrix methods. The new stuff that's more acc…
I would argue that python is actually ideally suited as a solution for many if not most things, just because there isn't large adoption in a subgenre of engineering, doesn't mean it isn't the right solution.
The primitives are there, its easy to comprehend, and there is a large amount of adoption in the scientific community outside EE.
I see lots of stuff that used to be done in things like matlab or mathmatica being done in python directly these days. At least at one of the places that I worked at, where we were a huge matlab shop for doing model design / algorithm simulation, has migrated most of their stuff to python.
Things like antenna design, RF simulation and a number of other things have a lot of of folks writing python code.