191–200 of 270 posts
This illustrates a problem with many "modern" applications. My first impression: "Oh, that looks nice. Looks like in real life". Then I tried using it and found that it is clunky and slow to the point it is barely usable and I would much faster build the real circuit on a real breadboard instead.
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It blew my mind that the microcontroller I'm now using has a 1000+ page datasheet.
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.
Going from a schematic to a breadboard, going from a breadboard to a stripboard or from a schematic to the actual PCB/IC is hard if you never have done it. It is like showing someone who has never seen written language a book and trying to make them understand that the signs map to spoken language somehow.
Groking that takes some time.
For that matter I think choosing the breadboarded representation of a circuit (in 3D!) for a simulation program is not really a good choice. For beginners it might seem like a good choice, but it prevents them from becoming accustomed to the schematics they will encounter everywhere. For more advanced people it is too clunky (schematics just are superiour for reasoning about circuits).
So far the best and most usable simulator I have come across is circuit.js by Paul Falstad. It has some circuits where the simulated circuit does not match reality at all (e.g. a CMOS-Inverter based relaxation oscillator), but it is extremely usable.
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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.
Another terrific option is Okular. It actually has a setting to reduce memory usage on large PDF files by not prerendering pages that are not being viewed.
I don't know if it ever got fixed. I stopped using Linux around the time when it was introduced, and having had to revert to using xpdf for browsing large PDFs like it was 1994 again was part of why I ragequit :-(.
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doesn't seem to work on chrome either
Hey! Would love to investigate and see why this isn't working for you. Any more info on your OS/specs/browser version or what exactly isn't working? Should work on chrome.
There's a similar product at https://wokwi.com/ (with an open source core) It's actually really useful, fast, educational. Highly recommended. I also wish someone would revitalize falstad circuit sim ( http://falstad.com/circuit/ ), which is still I think the best tool for experimentation with analog electronics. Just a little bit better interface and user friendliness and it would be amazing! A somewhat more robust…
I haven't contributed for a couple of years, but Paul still actively maintains it.
Do you have specific ideas on what would be changed to "revitalize" it? I agree the UI is kind of basic (it could do with a pallet of common components), but I still like the productivity of it.
For reference, here is a circuit simulator that was ported from a 2005 project and it is 2D. It also visualizes the voltage and current as speed and density of electron packets flowing through the circuit: https://www.falstad.com/circuit/ Maybe a similar sort of visualization could be used for this project? It is neat that it can simulate arduino uno code to pulse IO, as an in-simulation workbench.
I was trying to rig a feedback loop between a lamp and a photoresistor but it isn't working. Do you know if the photoresistor actually reads in light generated by other circuit components, or is it just supposed to simulate a variable resistor responding to light from outside the circuit?
The photoresistor is just controlled by the slider in the side-bar. It doesn't respond to lights in the circuit. There is an "optocoupler" under "active building blocks" that does connect optically.
I've seen a few requests to add feedback that occurs outside the electrical domain - light is one, but also for mechanical movement (motors that turn generators). But, I pesonally think it's hard to know how to model all these non-electrical interactions in a way that is visually clear and effective.