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Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware

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Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware

#71

Post by buescher »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #60
KeplerBoy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll grant you the vibecoding comment. That was uncalled for and unjustified. From an EE perspective I still see limited value in having a 3D breadboard. Having a standardized schematic language is really nice. Everybody knows how resistors, capacitors and transistors look like in a schematic, whereas they are all just little cuboids with varying number of pads in their smd packages. I recommend multisim blue for lea…

Is there a good free circuit simulator (that use a schematic as interface, I assume)? I somewhat agree with you in general though—if the web UX is a breadboard… maybe just get a breadboard? At the same time, while physical parts are generally cheap enough, power supplies, multimeters, an oscilloscope… that part of the hobby can add up. Sometimes too I am waiting a week or two for a part to arrive from Mouser, it is n…

There are many. What's your (computing) platform and what are you trying to simulate? The more professional tools (beginning with freebies like LTspice) are oriented around letting you probe waveforms from simulated inputs and are not as oriented towards interactive probing "does this LED light when I press that button?" as a hobbyist might want.

Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware

#72

Post by dgxyz »

jhedwards wrote: post #63
dgxyz wrote: post #11

I 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…

Ah this reminds me of my first big mistake with PCBs. I have recently started down the hardware track, and my first PCB has a number of BC547 and BC558 transistors on it. Once I had a functioning prototype, the next step was to convert it into a schematic. After that, you have to convert the schematic into a PCB. Now we are at two layers of translation, and at this step I made a mistake: I wanted to use SMD component…

We've all done that sort of stuff!

Mine was assuming that the stripe on tantalum SMD capacitors was the negative side. First prototype board came back from the fab and pick and place department (we had it in house). Immediately caught fire when I powered it up :)

Second lesson, start with current limit on your bench supply, not throw 10A into it :)

Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware

#73

Post by [deleted] »

jhedwards wrote: post #63
dgxyz wrote: post #11

I 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…

Ah this reminds me of my first big mistake with PCBs. I have recently started down the hardware track, and my first PCB has a number of BC547 and BC558 transistors on it. Once I had a functioning prototype, the next step was to convert it into a schematic. After that, you have to convert the schematic into a PCB. Now we are at two layers of translation, and at this step I made a mistake: I wanted to use SMD component…

[deleted]

Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware

#74

Post by buescher »

compumike wrote: post #67
buescher wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Schematics also help explain your circuit because the idioms of drawing them communicate intent. I think this is a key point. One could imagine three layers: (1) NETLIST: a list of text-only descriptions, like "R1 1 0 1k", or even a sentence description "connect a 1k resistor between node 1 and node 0" (2) SCHEMATIC: a 2D drawing with canonical symbols, straight lines for wires, and labels/notes (3) LAYOUT: a 3D (o…

You essentially can practice the classical art of memory on a 2D representation (think why you can remember who was at lunch by thinking about where they sat), and it's useful to have them at different levels. Almost any nontrivial schematic should have an associated block diagram (by this I do not mean it necessarily should be captured at the block diagram level in a "hierarchical design"; these can be more trouble than they're worth). There are other types of diagrams that can be useful, too.

I haven't done much HDL work so I don't have strong opinions there, but let's think about graphical representations source code and software intent for a moment. I like to see some block-level description of firmware even if it's just a few rectangles representing the main loop and each ISR other other process with text indicating what they do. I like to see statecharts. If someone has written an implicit flags-and-conditionals state machine, I'll draw the statechart and start probing for bugs and debugging from there. Tools like Scitools Understand are drastically underrated for figuring out other people's code, incidentally.

What kills me about the aforementioned style is that it eschews the schematic as a tool for thinking and implicitly sees schematic capture as a layer of friction you have to get through to get to layout. I suspect a lot of designs drawn that way were built up point-to-point on a breadboard and never sketched or even otherwise mentally visualized.

Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware

#75

Post by Helcal_pup »

hippich wrote: post #42

Are 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…

Not foss but tinkercad circuits (https://www.tinkercad.com/circuits) comes to mind.

Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware

#76

Post by peterus »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #60
KeplerBoy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll grant you the vibecoding comment. That was uncalled for and unjustified. From an EE perspective I still see limited value in having a 3D breadboard. Having a standardized schematic language is really nice. Everybody knows how resistors, capacitors and transistors look like in a schematic, whereas they are all just little cuboids with varying number of pads in their smd packages. I recommend multisim blue for lea…

Is there a good free circuit simulator (that use a schematic as interface, I assume)? I somewhat agree with you in general though—if the web UX is a breadboard… maybe just get a breadboard? At the same time, while physical parts are generally cheap enough, power supplies, multimeters, an oscilloscope… that part of the hobby can add up. Sometimes too I am waiting a week or two for a part to arrive from Mouser, it is n…

I've found a combination of circuitjs and a spice simulator to be quick for prototyping custom analog circuits (made mainly from discretes). Circuitjs https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html allows you to edit components live unlike spice simulators, but with the tradeoff of convergence issues for more complex circuits, so I use circuitjs as a playground then use LTspice as a rigorous simulator.

If it's a circuit made by composing multiple integrated circuits based on their application notes and not a custom analog design, I just use LTspice alone since you can just import the manufacturers spice behavioral model (assuming they didn't encrypt them...)

Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware

#77

Post by buescher »

asynchronous13 wrote: post #68
a-dub wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think altium has taken over as the top tier commercial offering in this space. I always disliked Orcad. Especially because cadence had excellent software that predated OrCAD, and for reasons that I cannot fathom chose to promote OrCAD after they acquired it instead of the better software. Here's a specific example in the interface. If you wanted to draw a wire, the keyboard shortcut of the old software was 'w' but…

Altium has taken over a lot of small to medium sized shops. Mostly because the price is right for its capability. It also has a history of being the least bad compromise between the odd mixtures of excellence and user-hostility Cadence and Mentor tend to come up with, going back to the Protel days, and they've done a good job in the last decade+ of marketing it to those shops. Cadence and Siemens nee Mentor (and maybe Zuken? I've never seen Zuken in the wild, but it always makes these lists) have been neglecting the entry level and smaller organizations and aggressively trying to move their customers to their higher tier offerings during that time. But while it's Altium's flagship product, it is not top tier. It is really entry-level for a professional PCB-level design package, like PADS and OrCAD as opposed to Xpedition and Allegro.

Re: Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware

#80

Post by estimator7292 »

jhedwards wrote: post #63
dgxyz wrote: post #11

I 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…

Ah this reminds me of my first big mistake with PCBs. I have recently started down the hardware track, and my first PCB has a number of BC547 and BC558 transistors on it. Once I had a functioning prototype, the next step was to convert it into a schematic. After that, you have to convert the schematic into a PCB. Now we are at two layers of translation, and at this step I made a mistake: I wanted to use SMD component…

I've been an EE for a decade and I made this exact mistake last week. It's inevitable lol
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