It doesn't seem as in-depth as something more pure electronics like this:
http://www.falstad.com/circuit (also as iCircuit for iPhone)
AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits
31–40 of 67 posts
Re: AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits
#32> it allows you to learn electronics using a virtual Arduino board and breadboard without blowing up capacitors or burning yourself with solder on your work table. With autodesk prices, i can probably buy enough caps and pay someone to solder for me.
Perhaps you're thinking of Autocad. They also sell dead cheap end user software, even on the iTunes store.
Re: AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits
#33I guess I'm not seeing the advantage over existing software. Unless there are some tie-ins with their other 123D software to, say, automatically create a hardware enclosure from a schematic.
We have that! Just push the "generate enclosure" button in the circuit details page.
Cool! I'll have to check this out then. I love 123D in general, it's like Inventor, only free!
That has long been my Achille's heel - I can EAGLE a pcb pretty easily, but woodworking / 3d interlocking Ponoko designs elude me.
Re: AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits
#34How do I add a voltage other than a 9V battery? What are the current alternatives to this? I'm looking to build an LED driver (possible IC candidates are Linear LT3477, TI TPS63020 and some other TI / Linear chips). I'd kill for a software that would simulate any chips (or even just a crude approximation of them).
LTspice [0] is an excellent (and might I add free) SPICE simulator. Linear includes proper models of the majority of their chip lineup, including LED drivers. Their power supply IC models are also excellent. You can simulate a full LED driver circuit and a whole lot more with LTspice. TI also has a similar SPICE simulator [1], but it's not nearly as good, and its simulations are much slower and a bit more unreliable.
I design electronics for a living, and I use LTspice all the time for power supply and analog circuit simulations.
Re: AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits
#35I think there is a lot of value to blowing up your Arduino for reals. When you blow up a couple of Arduinos, you'll tend to force yourself to learn very quickly why it is happening and how to avoid it. What is so bad about "blowing up a capacitor" or "burning yourself with a soldering iron"? Capacitors are a few cents, each. Buy them in bulk and never worry about needing one again. Soldering iron burns are easy to av…
> "I feel like this is missing a big point. Arduino is the safe, easy entry point to learn electronics."
An Arduino Uno costs about 25USD. Blowing up a few of those, or other components gets pricy. This service lowers the price of entry to almost zero, which is a pretty big deal for people with low disposable income or limited access to the hardware.
Re: AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits
#36How do I add a voltage other than a 9V battery? What are the current alternatives to this? I'm looking to build an LED driver (possible IC candidates are Linear LT3477, TI TPS63020 and some other TI / Linear chips). I'd kill for a software that would simulate any chips (or even just a crude approximation of them).
LTspice [0] is an excellent (and might I add free) SPICE simulator. Linear includes proper models of the majority of their chip lineup, including LED drivers. Their power supply IC models are also excellent. You can simulate a full LED driver circuit and a whole lot more with LTspice. TI also has a similar SPICE simulator [1], but it's not nearly as good, and its simulations are much slower and a bit more unreliable.…
Worth pointing out too that most major semiconductor vendors provide SPICE models for their parts. Maxim, for example, has an extensive set of models for their chips: http://www.maximintegrated.com/design/tools/modeling-simulat...
Re: AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits
#37I think there is a lot of value to blowing up your Arduino for reals. When you blow up a couple of Arduinos, you'll tend to force yourself to learn very quickly why it is happening and how to avoid it. What is so bad about "blowing up a capacitor" or "burning yourself with a soldering iron"? Capacitors are a few cents, each. Buy them in bulk and never worry about needing one again. Soldering iron burns are easy to av…
There are so many people that underestimated the potential success for Arduino, and the rPi. Also, experienced hardware folks tend to forget how unforgiving hardware can be to non-hardware folks, and beginners; a good example of which was posted here the other day. http://www.jwz.org/curtain/
Re: AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits
#38How do I add a voltage other than a 9V battery? What are the current alternatives to this? I'm looking to build an LED driver (possible IC candidates are Linear LT3477, TI TPS63020 and some other TI / Linear chips). I'd kill for a software that would simulate any chips (or even just a crude approximation of them).
This is an issue we've been tackling at CircuitLab (https://www.circuitlab.com/), and the fundamental issue is that the chip makers (Linear, TI, Analog Devices, etc) don't want to let their device models out of the building. They often do have simplified models for simpler parts (op-amps), but for more complex mixed-mode parts (switchers), coverage is sparse, and a SPICE netlist is a poor language for encoding the control logic. LTspice, for example, includes encrypted models for many of their switching power supply parts, and those include special non-standard SPICE behavioral components to make the models possible to execute in a reasonable amount of time. Other companies with web-based / server-side simulation keep the models entirely opaque and tremendously limit your ability to configure the surrounding components. The goal is to get you just far enough to have confidence that their chip is the solution for you, and then get you to use their tools and field application engineers. This is the status quo and they're generally not in any rush to disturb it.
Re: AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits
#39I wonder if it models the terrible parasitics of a real breadboard. I imagine it would be really annoying for beginners to build an IR receiver (or whatever) with the software, have it working perfectly, then try to build it on a real breadboard only to spend hours frustratingly trying to figure out why the circuit is oscillating.
Is there any software out there that includes these real-world models into the design side?
mbell is right -- rather than just adding parasitic capacitance and inductance estimates to every node, it's more helpful for the engineer to be able to evaluate and discover which nodes are particularly sensitive and which aren't. Start with some back-of-the-envelope order-of-magnitude estimates (maybe guess ~1nH/mm inductance for a wire, ~1pF capacitance between adjacent pins), and an experienced engineer will already be able to eyeball likely trouble spots in your circuit. The novice can certainly use the same concepts with simulation to do quite a bit of "debugging" in just a few minutes, for example dragging around a 1pF cap between a bunch of pins, re-running the simulation each time, and seeing where it has the most detrimental effect on an analog circuit.
Re: AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any software out there that includes these real-world models into the design side?
mbell is right -- rather than just adding parasitic capacitance and inductance estimates to every node, it's more helpful for the engineer to be able to evaluate and discover which nodes are particularly sensitive and which aren't. Start with some back-of-the-envelope order-of-magnitude estimates (maybe guess ~1nH/mm inductance for a wire, ~1pF capacitance between adjacent pins), and an experienced engineer will alre…
Just to add, if you want to 'fail safe' a breadboard design, your better off assuming ~25pF of stray capacitance per breadboard insertion point. You should also make sure your circuit bandwidth is less than ~8-10Mhz, keeping in mind that if you have an opamp with GBP of 20Mhz and you're using it with a gain of 2, you may have a problem. Stray inductance can also play a part, but it's far less likely.