4 ms·

The Technology of iCircuit 3D

70 points by deddo 6y ago

jayd16 6y ago
Kind of neat. Why not async and TPL instead of all the manual locking?
- pjc50 6y ago
  TPL? It seems to be a "classical" OO model with mutation-from-anywhere. Effectively a database in memory.
  - jayd16 6y ago
    Excuse me for my terseness, Task Parallel Library. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Extensions#Task_Parallel_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Extensions#Task_Paral...
- praeclarum 6y ago
  There is tons of TPL (Task Parallel Library, async and await), I was just trying to keep the blog simple. Once you have thread-safe primitives, you can build higher level abstractions on top of those. In fact I worked a bit on the TPL when I worked at Microsoft so I definitely abuse it. :-)
  - jayd16 6y ago
    Ah ok. That makes much more sense. From the wording in the blog I got the impression it was being avoided with manual locking.
MattRix 6y ago
Very cool, but seems like a bizarre choice to use C# and then lock in to Apple’s stuff. If you’re making a 3D app with C# you might as well use Unity. Something like this could even find an audience on Steam.
- nbevans 6y ago
  He used what he is productive in though and there is nothing wrong with that. Obj-C and (to a lesser extent) Swift are pretty alien to a long-time .NET developer. The author of this app is very active in the Xamarin space and recently contributed enhancements for Catalyst support.
  - Pulcinella 6y ago
    I’m a little surprised he went with SceneKit for rendering. I don’t expect it to go away anytime soon, but it also hasn’t received a lot of love from Apple in the past several years. Edit: of course it can be great to use what you are comfortable with. Done (and really, really good, is better than perfect. The way he is using property definitions with SetUndoableProperty seems like a really good fit for Swift’s property wrappers. Instead of writing getter and setters for every property you could just write them in once in the property wrapper definition and then annotate each property with @Undoable.
  - praeclarum 6y ago
    Nailed it. I started iOS development using Obj-C++ but switched to C# after a couple years because of my familiarity and comfort in that ecosystem. At this point I've used it for 10 years on several iOS and Mac apps and know its ins and outs. I've been accused of making my own job harder but honestly it feels the opposite for me. The .NET debugger, reflection, choice of languages, package ecosystem, it's all very lovely.
  - MattRix 6y ago
    There’s obviously something wrong with that, because now he is unable to release his app on other platforms where it would probably find a larger audience. To be clear, C# is a great language for this project. It’s the choice of using a platform specific library (SceneKit) that baffles me.
sriram_malhar 6y ago
Most impressive! I have used iCircuit 2D before and loved it, and looking forward to upgrade.
rurdaneta 6y ago
for more information on cybersecurity and how to keep your company safe, log on to demyo inc, you will find a wealth of valuable information. https://demyo.com/ https://demyo.com/
scrumper 6y ago
Can't wait to buy the original iCircuit, just need it to support vacuum tubes... Any plans to do that or are you really focusing on the Arduino/digital hobby? This might have use for layout prototyping, thinking about it. But until it has tubes I don't need it. Nice work - really does look good.
- praeclarum 6y ago
  I owe the iCircuit community vacuum tubes. I've been promising them for some 10 years now. My hesitance has mostly been my inability to verify the simulations. I prefer to have physical elements available so I can double-check the app. But I think I will have to resign myself to verifying against SPICE or something.
  - scrumper 6y ago
    Glad to be part of that annoying sense of guilt at the back of your mind :) For me it's less about modeling the tube and more about checking the rest of the circuit around the tube if that makes sense. Does the tone control do what I want, and so on. Personally I'm looking to verify relatively simple parameters of a tube in a circuit: gain, whether it's operating in the linear region given a particular bias, that sort of thing. If the model was simply a representation of the tube's characteristic curves that'd be good enough for my purposes. So being SPICE-like would work ok. After all that's what I'm doing now!
diimdeep 6y ago
@praeclarum What do you know that no one else that let you bet so much on C#, .NET stack for developing with it for macOS, iOS ? That to me seems really risky.
- praeclarum 6y ago
  It’s open source and I have successfully compiled and ran it on my own machine. So I do not fear it going away. The biggest risk is it could not be updated at some point. But, again, OSS. The community could continue the work.

70 points by deddo 6y ago

jayd16 6y ago

Kind of neat. Why not async and TPL instead of all the manual locking?

pjc50 6y ago
TPL? It seems to be a "classical" OO model with mutation-from-anywhere. Effectively a database in memory.
- jayd16 6y ago
  Excuse me for my terseness, Task Parallel Library. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Extensions#Task_Parallel_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Extensions#Task_Paral...
praeclarum 6y ago
There is tons of TPL (Task Parallel Library, async and await), I was just trying to keep the blog simple. Once you have thread-safe primitives, you can build higher level abstractions on top of those. In fact I worked a bit on the TPL when I worked at Microsoft so I definitely abuse it. :-)
- jayd16 6y ago
  Ah ok. That makes much more sense. From the wording in the blog I got the impression it was being avoided with manual locking.

MattRix 6y ago

Very cool, but seems like a bizarre choice to use C# and then lock in to Apple’s stuff. If you’re making a 3D app with C# you might as well use Unity. Something like this could even find an audience on Steam.

nbevans 6y ago
He used what he is productive in though and there is nothing wrong with that. Obj-C and (to a lesser extent) Swift are pretty alien to a long-time .NET developer. The author of this app is very active in the Xamarin space and recently contributed enhancements for Catalyst support.
- Pulcinella 6y ago
  I’m a little surprised he went with SceneKit for rendering. I don’t expect it to go away anytime soon, but it also hasn’t received a lot of love from Apple in the past several years. Edit: of course it can be great to use what you are comfortable with. Done (and really, really good, is better than perfect. The way he is using property definitions with SetUndoableProperty seems like a really good fit for Swift’s property wrappers. Instead of writing getter and setters for every property you could just write them in once in the property wrapper definition and then annotate each property with @Undoable.
- praeclarum 6y ago
  Nailed it. I started iOS development using Obj-C++ but switched to C# after a couple years because of my familiarity and comfort in that ecosystem. At this point I've used it for 10 years on several iOS and Mac apps and know its ins and outs. I've been accused of making my own job harder but honestly it feels the opposite for me. The .NET debugger, reflection, choice of languages, package ecosystem, it's all very lovely.
- MattRix 6y ago
  There’s obviously something wrong with that, because now he is unable to release his app on other platforms where it would probably find a larger audience. To be clear, C# is a great language for this project. It’s the choice of using a platform specific library (SceneKit) that baffles me.

sriram_malhar 6y ago

Most impressive! I have used iCircuit 2D before and loved it, and looking forward to upgrade.

rurdaneta 6y ago

for more information on cybersecurity and how to keep your company safe, log on to demyo inc, you will find a wealth of valuable information. https://demyo.com/ https://demyo.com/

scrumper 6y ago

Can't wait to buy the original iCircuit, just need it to support vacuum tubes... Any plans to do that or are you really focusing on the Arduino/digital hobby? This might have use for layout prototyping, thinking about it. But until it has tubes I don't need it. Nice work - really does look good.

praeclarum 6y ago
I owe the iCircuit community vacuum tubes. I've been promising them for some 10 years now. My hesitance has mostly been my inability to verify the simulations. I prefer to have physical elements available so I can double-check the app. But I think I will have to resign myself to verifying against SPICE or something.
- scrumper 6y ago
  Glad to be part of that annoying sense of guilt at the back of your mind :) For me it's less about modeling the tube and more about checking the rest of the circuit around the tube if that makes sense. Does the tone control do what I want, and so on. Personally I'm looking to verify relatively simple parameters of a tube in a circuit: gain, whether it's operating in the linear region given a particular bias, that sort of thing. If the model was simply a representation of the tube's characteristic curves that'd be good enough for my purposes. So being SPICE-like would work ok. After all that's what I'm doing now!

diimdeep 6y ago

@praeclarum What do you know that no one else that let you bet so much on C#, .NET stack for developing with it for macOS, iOS ? That to me seems really risky.

praeclarum 6y ago
It’s open source and I have successfully compiled and ran it on my own machine. So I do not fear it going away. The biggest risk is it could not be updated at some point. But, again, OSS. The community could continue the work.