Nice! You can play Electroboom without actually getting shocked. If you do want the real world experience you can get bags full of components on Amazon for pretty cheap
Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware
41–50 of 107 posts
Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware
#42Are there similar solutions without 3d view? I want to get a simulator that can show me what is going in the circuit, ideally slowed down a lot. For example I was making a dongle with resistor and capacitor which was delivering a pulse-short (i.e. removing power for a short period of time instead of delivering an impulse) and while I was able to confirm overall idea with some online simulator, dialing in capacitance and resistance required physically switching components. Ideally I want to be able simulate such transient effects and arrive at specific numbers ready to be soldered.
And I want it to be free/open-sourse ideally :)
Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware
#43Not a fan. The standard schematic abstraction is great and actually helps us parse circuits. Don't add unnecessary complexity just because AIs are good at vibecoding threejs demos (edit: even if this particular demo seems to predate vibecoding and was likely used for training instead of being the product of inference).
I don't think the vibecoding jab is warranted, but I agree this is a pretty terrible UI for electronic circuits. Schematic capture exists for a reason! It's not even difficult for beginners to understand if you have a decent UX (which for some reason seems to elude 90% of PCB software).
Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware
#44Are there similar solutions without 3d view? I want to get a simulator that can show me what is going in the circuit, ideally slowed down a lot. For example I was making a dongle with resistor and capacitor which was delivering a pulse-short (i.e. removing power for a short period of time instead of delivering an impulse) and while I was able to confirm overall idea with some online simulator, dialing in capacitance…
Some people like Everycircuit and Falstad for that.
Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware
#45Are there similar solutions without 3d view? I want to get a simulator that can show me what is going in the circuit, ideally slowed down a lot. For example I was making a dongle with resistor and capacitor which was delivering a pulse-short (i.e. removing power for a short period of time instead of delivering an impulse) and while I was able to confirm overall idea with some online simulator, dialing in capacitance…
Sounds like you are looking for a SPICE like simulator, there are quite a few free/open:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_electronics_circu...
Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware
#46I appreciated that smoke comes out of the battery if you short it :) Edit: I am ex EE. I will note that it's horrible using this view. It is marginally more horrible than using breadboards in reality. Schematics exist because reality tends to suck or have inconsistencies. For example TO-99 packages come in different pin orders, so 2N3904 has the opposite order to a BC547. Also breadboards tend not to have full length…
Schematics also help explain your circuit because the idioms of drawing them communicate intent. Which is one of the things the Shenzhen/Ladyada/Sparkfun/SeedStudio crowd don't get with their "schematic as data entry for layout" style. Some of them should know better.
Breadboards make me wince a little especially in a professional setting but I've made my peace with dev boards that come with DIP-style pins for them. Decent breadboards are so cheap now that every dev board get to live on its own permanent breadboard.
Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware
#47Are there similar solutions without 3d view? I want to get a simulator that can show me what is going in the circuit, ideally slowed down a lot. For example I was making a dongle with resistor and capacitor which was delivering a pulse-short (i.e. removing power for a short period of time instead of delivering an impulse) and while I was able to confirm overall idea with some online simulator, dialing in capacitance…
orcad is the commercial classic for doing schematics with a spice backend. (spice is an oss engine out of berkeley for simulating circuits on computers. for dc it just solves the classic nodal analysis and for ac you can feed in things from a fantasy signal generator and capture things at various nodes in the circuit) there's also some pretty cool looking commercial web thing now that also will maintain netlists with real-time prices and will let you swap parts out and set minimum quantities etc.
kicad is the oss orcad, but i never got good at it. (to be fair, orcad was weird to learn as well)
Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware
#48Super cool. Wonder if we can input the circuit as code.
As others have mentioned, SPICE is the traditional answer to that question. But SPICE feels more like a macro-assembler for circuits.
One project that comes to mind for high-level programming style circuits-as-code:
https://github.com/atopile/atopile
Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39263854 More recent HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44548449
Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware
#49Nice! You can play Electroboom without actually getting shocked. If you do want the real world experience you can get bags full of components on Amazon for pretty cheap
The simulation needs an "Amazon factor" slider, which randomly makes:
* All breadboard wires have some resistance
* Some breadboard wires have very high resistance
* Some breadboard wires have intermittent contact, recalculated every time components are added/removed from the breadboard
* Some fraction of polarized capacitors are backwards
* All capacitors are overrated for voltage and explode at 70-99% of their rating
* Some LEDs smoke at 10% of their rated forward current
* Brightness variation between LEDs that should be identical
* Semiconductors may randomly be another semiconductor in the same class (e.g. a "2n2222" may in fact be any other NPN BJT in the simulation, or the parameters may be entirely random)
* Inductors have 80% variation in core saturation specs, but other parameters are spot-on
* Any component with writable flash (eg USB vid/pid strings) may randomly not actually have writable flash but instead fixed strings and the writes fake success but the values do not change
Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware
#50Nice! You can play Electroboom without actually getting shocked. If you do want the real world experience you can get bags full of components on Amazon for pretty cheap
The simulation needs an "Amazon factor" slider, which randomly makes: * All breadboard wires have some resistance * Some breadboard wires have very high resistance * Some breadboard wires have intermittent contact, recalculated every time components are added/removed from the breadboard * Some fraction of polarized capacitors are backwards * All capacitors are overrated for voltage and explode at 70-99% of their rati…
Better simulators can do parameter sweeps and monte carlo simulations so you can explore tolerance stackup issues. But most of the failure modes you've listed there are just why you shouldn't build your circuits for one on breadboards and for another with dodgy parts sourced outside of distribution channels.