22 ms·

A circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 2003

905 points by malerba118 4y ago

melony 4y ago
Are you using SPICE for the actual simulation?
- CoffeePython 4y ago
  Hey! I work on Diode w/ Austin (OP). Yeah we use a wasm-compiled version of ngSpice for the circuit simulation.
  - etimberg 4y ago
    Cool! We did something similar when I was on the team that built multisim.com
    - tiagod 4y ago
      That's so cool that there's a web version now! I was introduced to multisim back in high-school and enjoyed that unit a lot, will play around with it on the weekend :)
  - marmetio 4y ago
    How will Diode differentiate itself from TINA? They have 3D breadboard, web browser, microcontroller code simulation, PCB layout, equation extraction, etc. https://www.tina.com/edison/ https://www.tina.com/edison/
  - kragen 4y ago
    presumably melony already knew that because ngspice is mostly licensed under a 3-clause bsd license which says > Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. unless you're violating the ngspice license? or the documentation and/or other materials are just hard to find? parts of ngspice are also licensed under gplv2, cc-by-sa-4.0, lgpl-2.1+, or gpl2+, but maybe you aren't using those parts
    - melony 4y ago
      Melony is not that pedantic and melony does not ask questions whose answers melony already know. Melony has better things to do than to hound SaaS services over alleged license violations (unlike a certain somebody).
      - kragen 4y ago
        perhaps if melony didn't know that, it is evidence that the required credit is, in effect, not being given; that the authors of this software are, in effect, passing off the work of the ngspice contributors as their own
IshKebab 4y ago
Pretty cool, though I would say that a breadboard is probably a worse UI for capturing circuits than whatever we had in 2003. But it is fair that e.g. LTspice has a terrible GUI. I always thought QUCS had the best UI of all the free options: https://qucs.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html https://qucs.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html Unfortunately it's not the most popular project.
- malerba118 4y ago
  3d does present some additional challenges, but we decided to go this route to reduce friction for beginners who might not understand how schematics or other abstract representations map to the real world circuits they're playing with
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    I'm still not sure what the 3D aspect in particular adds, though. Tools which work with physical wiring diagrams, like Fritzing, have been available for ages, and I don't think the 2D nature of those tools has ever been a meaningful obstacle to understanding.
    - azalemeth 4y ago
      In my opinion, 3D is useful if: a) You want to check that your components won't physically bash into something else you care about b) You are designing something that operates at RF to mm-wave frequencies and need to worry (a lot) about the spatial location of the high-frequency components and nearby conductors / ground planes c) You want to get an idea about airflow and heat dissipation on power electronics and/or modules (such as power amplifiers) that come with their own heatsinks (some SIPs do!) Kicad and other bits of more hobby-orientated software that do a 3D render (such as diptrace) tend to do it for reasons (a) and (c). Software that does (b) properly costs hundreds of thousands of €$£ per year to rent and tends to have a UI that makes you scream with frustration at every possible moment.
      - duskwuff 4y ago
pugworthy 4y ago
Ah skeuomorphism my old friend. So good to see you!
- musicale 4y ago
  Is that you Scott Forstall?
mtreis86 4y ago
Are there any inductors or transformers? I don't see any on the left parts panel. I want to make an oscillator.
- gumboza 4y ago
  That's where the whole thing falls apart with these things usually. Oscillators are quite difficult to simulate because they require less than ideal startup conditions i.e. noise, voltage gradients to get going. While the SPICE engine underneath does support that, you can't really expect someone wiring up a breadboard to be completely aware of the nuances around simulation vs reality. This got to a point that Bob Pease of legendary analogue design fame, chucked a computer off a roof https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrZ_fMqd8k8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrZ_fMqd8k8
  - kragen 4y ago
    also if your oscillator's q is high it can take a terribly long time in simulation to start oscillating
- malerba118 4y ago
  Not currently, but useful feedback for us!
proee 4y ago
This is great for learning - you should consider a mode that switches to traditional schematic view so people can understand the corresponding circuit.
- steve_adams_86 4y ago
  I believe another web-based tool which can do this already is https://www.flux.ai https://www.flux.ai I've noodled around with it and I like it, but I actually find working with pencil, paper, and the actual components to be more efficient than panning and zooming around a 3d environment. It's not always an option so these simulators are very useful, but I've come to realize I'm far better off by planning not to use these tools, I guess.
  - built_with_flux 4y ago
    flux founder here thanks for the plug! We are working on making our schematic editor so good...you'll never go back to paper :)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - steve_adams_86 4y ago
      I’m realizing I didn’t give flux the credit I should have. I actually interviewed to work on it because as far as I can tell, this stuff is the future. So that aside, it doesn’t fit my workflow well today but I don’t doubt that it will, and for many people it already does. I’m glad to hear good things are coming! I’ll definitely keep checking in. Apologies for being dismissive of the hard work your team does, especially after seeing the kinds of technical challenges you take on and working with similar technologies myself these days. High performance, user-friendly collaborative tools in the browser are not a free lunch, and what flux does today is already impressive.
      - rock_hard 4y ago
Kwpolska 4y ago
The competition might look ancient, but IMO, a 2D interface would be much more productive and easier to work with. This site is completely unusable for me in Firefox (it does work in Edge though).
- Taniwha 4y ago
  doesn't seem to work on chrome either
  - CoffeePython 4y ago
    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.
    - Taniwha 4y ago
      latest linux chrome Version 108.0.5359.124 (Official Build) (64-bit) on ubuntu latest LTS, directly from google (not in a snap). Starts up but central window just has a rotating loading icon that never goes away
  - jakear 4y ago
    Do you perhaps have "Advanced Security" mode enabled, where JIT is disabled for new sites? Site was super jank at first but once I added it to my exception list it was buttery on my M1.
- CoffeePython 4y ago
  Yeah on my machine it's a lot slower using Firefox than chrome. We can investigate and see why it's happening. Also I do agree that 2D interface is probably important to add at some point too! I think right now the skeuomorphism is nice for folks wanting to get their hands dirty with circuit projects but don't have all the materials/supplies available for whatever reason (cost/space/etc)
  - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
oscillonoscope 4y ago
Nice idea but it's not very useful without net names or a schematic view. A nice looking UI isn't good if it's not functional
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jonathankoren 4y ago
Skeuomorphism? No thanks. I’d rather keep the circuit plan clear.
pkstn 4y ago
Wow, so awesome!
gumboza 4y ago
I want 2003. That's the last time anything worked. LTspice for example. Edit: worth nothing there is a native macOS port of LTspice now.
- coupdejarnac 4y ago
  LTspice still works great afaik. I use it on Linux with Wine.
  - rahen 4y ago
    Have a look at Qucs-S for a native, usable Spice on Linux: https://ra3xdh.github.io https://ra3xdh.github.io It's still missing a comprehensive component library like LTspice does though, contributions are welcome. KiCad can also simulate circuits through NGSpice, but it's missing a library and suffers from a lot of quirks.
- antegamisou 4y ago
  > I want 2003. That's the last time anything worked. This. NI Multisim is one of my [proprietary] favorites too.
  - teleforce 4y ago
    Just wondering can Multisim integrate seamlessly with Ultiboard for circuit emulation since both of them now under NI? I know that Proteus simulator can perform the emulation to some extent.
- Arubis 4y ago
  LTspice at least had a gui! I remember sketching schematics by hand, marking up nodes with names, then feeding plaintext into PSpice. But it worked great!
  - gumboza 4y ago
    Yes indeed. I used to do that on a Sun workstation back in the 1990s as well. Then go and make some tea while the simulation was running.
SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
Schematics are for understanding what a circuit does. Breadboards are for prototyping small low-speed circuits. Veroboard is for prototyping larger medium-speed circuits. Gerbers & a PCB are for production and for prototyping large or high-speed circuits. If the tool could automatically make a 3D breadboard view from a schematic, it'd be pretty neat for beginners. If the tool warned you when the normal parasitic capacitance between breadboard rows would cause problems with a part you're using, that'd be amazing for teaching.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  Fritzing can kind of make breadboards from schematics, but doesn't have a 3D view... which I'm fine with because why do we need 3D?
  - dylan604 4y ago
    >which I'm fine with because why do we need 3D? James Cameron would like a word with you. Seriously though, 3D can show off some things that just might not be realized without it. Not sure of Fritzing's design abilities with layered PCBs, but I could imagine trying to design a layered board and forgetting how tall a component is. Seeing a component "through" the second layer could be useful
    - app4soft 4y ago
      Fritzing is more like 2,5D.[0] [0] https://blog.fritzing.org/2022/06/27/Simulating-Circuits-with-Fritzing https://blog.fritzing.org/2022/06/27/Simulating-Circuits-wit...
    - goodpoint 4y ago
      If your circuit is so complex that you need a breadboard planner and even an fully 3D visualization you have a big problem and you should not be breadboarding but ordering a PCB.
  - AceJohnny2 4y ago
    > because why do we need 3D? Teaching is much easier when the students can connect the abstract representation to something they can experience.
heywherelogingo 4y ago
The ones from 2003 worked - this is mostly blank and does nothing.
- CoffeePython 4y ago
  looks like our db went down for a few minutes when you were trying it out! Sorry about that!
- malerba118 4y ago
  this combines spice simulations with microcontroller simulations
  - kragen 4y ago
    for me it combines a blank white page with no error message with some buttons at the top that don't do anything
  - blacklion 4y ago
    Proteus mixed mode simulation is here from... let me look it up... 1996! 26 years for now. And it looks modern enough for me.
tkanarsky 4y ago
Tiny nit: the labels on the Arduino headers are z-fighting when zoomed out -- maybe offset them a bit to counter loss of precision?
revenga99 4y ago
Man the circuit simulators I had to use at university a couple of years ago were old. They were in color and the TA's told me that was a big deal.
- bitwize 4y ago
  16 colors at 640x480 resolution! VGA graphics are the future!
antegamisou 4y ago
Also check out TARGET 3001! for a 3D view mode https://ibfriedrich.com/en/index.html https://ibfriedrich.com/en/index.html
mdswanson 4y ago
CRUMB Circuit Simulator too: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198800/CRUMB_Circuit_Simulator/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198800/CRUMB_Circuit_Sim...
onirom 4y ago
Is there some tools like this which can simulate old school stuff such as magnetic core memory ?
godelski 4y ago
It sure is pretty, but there's a critical issue. Components can have their pins labeled, but this is done in the 3D environment. Just place them down on the right side. There's plenty of white space there. No one wants to rotate a component around like that and strain their head to read. I'm literally just going to pull up Google and get the schematic there. You have the information but it is displayed in a way that is hostile to the user. I can't even see where pin 1 is without this view because there's no marker like we'd see on a standard real life component.
- CoffeePython 4y ago
  Great feedback, we've chatted a bit about this internally already. It's something we'll likely add. In general we're looking for ways to make it easier to see pinouts/voltages/current/etc. Thanks for sharing!
  - godelski 4y ago
    Great to hear. It's hard to put your work out there and you did a good job. User interfaces are hard. What's obvious to some is hostile to others lol
Stevvo 4y ago
Nice touch that you can fry a LED, but unfortunately I couldn't get the Arduino to fry; it's the expensive part and the one I would want to run a simulation to make sure I will not destroy.
- CoffeePython 4y ago
  oh most've missed adding that in. we'll make sure you can let the magic smoke out of the arduino if you fry it too lol
bandyaboot 4y ago
I’ll take 2003 design over something that looks like it was designed by Apple for iOS circa 2010.
Kiboneu 4y ago
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/ 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.
- laveur 4y ago
  I use this a lot for quickly testing things out when I am not entirely sure what I need. It's incredibly powerful, and give you scopes so you can verify things work. It may be very old and look ancient by modern standards but it's much more usable for me. Also I don't need sonmething to simulate an Arduino, I need something to say test a op-amp summing amplifier.
  - kragen 4y ago
    the simulation blows up sometimes it doesn't look ancient to me
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  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?
  - alphabetter 4y ago
    I've contributed quite a lot to Paul's simulator, including doing the port so it runs natively in the browser. 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.
gnramires 4y ago
There's a similar product at https://wokwi.com/ 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/ 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 numerical backend (that can give error guarantees) would also be nice, you kind of have to tinker with time steps in some cases.
- malerba118 4y ago
  Wokwi is an awesome tool! We're actually using wokwi's open-sourced avr simulator to power arduinos in diode. One thing wokwi doesn't do however is analog simulation so we're hoping to combine spice simulations with arduino, rpi, esp32, etc.
  - gnramires 4y ago
    Indeed, mixed signal simulations would be very useful, I reckon, for people dealing with sensors and that kind of stuff. Might as well simulate it before building it. It's currently possible with falstad's open source code base as well, you just have to program inputs and outputs but it's not very ergonomical let's put it that way. In any case, I always encourage trying to be as open as you can with the software, this encourages collaboration/cooperation (and of course is just better for everyone, in most cases!). I think (like others here) any slightly more advanced user would be more comfortable/productive in a 2D interface most of the time. But the option of having 3D for blinkenlights is sure nice :) (also a great accessibility for people who can't afford to buy hardware for learning and experimentation but have access to a computer)
- alphabetter 4y ago
  I did the port of Paul's sim so that it runs natively in the browser instead of needing a Java plug-in (remember them) and made various other contributions. 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.
app4soft 4y ago
Recent and related: Diode: Build, program, and simulate hardware projects in the browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33396792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33396792 (26 comments)
pifm_guy 4y ago
A similar project: CircuitJS: https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html I couldn't compare to OP because it timed out loading on my slow internet.
avsteele 4y ago
This seems pretty cool, esp for a newbie to know how to put down a circuit. I use http://www.circuitlab.com http://www.circuitlab.com and find it to be quite good for laying down parts and doing simulation including time-dependence and with parameters. Very reasonably priced IMO.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
franky47 4y ago
For a more schematic + signal analysis, less breadboard IRL approach, EveryCircuit is just as good looking. https://everycircuit.com/ https://everycircuit.com/
justaj 4y ago
This looks amazing, but I wish the UI would have been a little more light-weight. I'm running on 100% CPU in Chromium on my Thinkpad X220.
- RodgerTheGreat 4y ago
  Lightweight UIs sound pretty 2003. Can't have that.
- sgt 4y ago
  Looks great, but yes, this is pretty unusable due to the high CPU usage. Also on Chromium.
beambot 4y ago
Circuit Lab (https://www.circuitlab.com/ https://www.circuitlab.com/) has been my go-to for a while...
dismalpedigree 4y ago
Check out https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198800/CRUMB_Circuit_Simulator/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198800/CRUMB_Circuit_Sim... also. Excellent UI.
aifer4 4y ago
This is a great technical demonstration of how to visualize a circuit board. But I would rather walk over hot coals than try to actually design a circuit using this interface. Circuits can be represented very nicely in two dimensions, which is convenient given that computer screens are two dimensional. For things which are fundamentally 3D (e.g. models of objects) it can be useful for design purposes to have a 3D visualization, but this doesn't seem to be the case with circuits.
kragen 4y ago
what I really want is a circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 02003 because it looks like it was made in 01963 the aesthetics and clarity of the schematics of a tektronix oscilloscope manual from 01963 plus the instant responsivity of the actual 01963 tektronix oscilloscope; but married with the flexibility, generality, reproducibility, and monte carlo capabilities you can get out of modern teraflops desktop hardware, with the scriptability of emacs and the breadth of simulation models you can get in ltspice, and of course not limited to 10 megahertz i guess it's true that this simulator doesn't look like it was made in 02003 because, after taking several minutes to load, it just displays a blank white page with buttons that don't do anything circuit simulators almost never did that in 02003, though i guess berkeley spice sort of does until you read its man page apparently from the other comments it's supposed to be a thing with some kind of 3-d model of a breadboard though? why would you want that? the reason we usually draw schematics before putting together breadboards, and we show each other schematics instead of breadboards, is because breadboards are a terrible user interface for circuits; schematics are much easier to understand because you can organize your components logically instead of being constrained by how things are packaged, and also you can tell what the components are by looking at them let me recommend a circuit simulator which, though lacking in some ways (especially realistic component simulation and integration with spice and kicad), takes advantage of the possibilities of computers to do better than paper schematics instead of worse: http://falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html http://falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html
- musicale 4y ago
  Still trying to solve that Y10K problem I see.
  - kragen 4y ago
    it's slow going, but fortunately we still have a significant amount of time left
    - classified 4y ago
      But it's invalid. Octal doesn't allow digits above 7.
panzi 4y ago
Looks very nice, but on my old PC with my new 4k monitor it is unusable. It would be cool if it could render at half resolution (quarter the number of pixels) during animation and only when animation ends render one frame at full resolution.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Yes, it simulates blowing stuff up. Run this and wait: https://www.withdiode.com/projects/03af8e77-ff1b-4304-b1dd-de1f5f90bf33 https://www.withdiode.com/projects/03af8e77-ff1b-4304-b1dd-d...
- defactoPun 4y ago
  Only thing I miss now is that burnt LED smell xD
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Worth the day it will take off your life expectancy!
hgsgm 4y ago
anothernewdude 4y ago
Just made me wish it wasn't chugging to render the 3D.
scott_h 4y ago
Guess what component a simulator named diode that doesn't have...
scott_h 4y ago
Guess what component a simulator named diode doesn't have...
rickreynoldssf 4y ago
This does nothing but spike my CPU. :(
mrtweetyhack 4y ago
ralusek 4y ago
Pretty awesome, thanks for building this.
blobbers 4y ago
Yay b2logic!
oillio 4y ago
I hate to be a hater but, this is so skeuomorphic I would just rather use a physical breadboard
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jesselawson 4y ago
I'm sorry about all the negativity in the comments. What I see is something that was handcrafted with the careful touch of a craftsperson that represents your individual vision for a specific digital experience. I can tell you put a lot of time into making this. Thank you for sharing this!
paleogizmo 4y ago
For a nice, polished, non-skeuomorphic circuit simulator, see iCircuit [1], which provides native MacOS and iOS clients (based on the Falstad JS circuit simulator mentioned elsewhere in this thread, if I recall correctly). It differs from most SPICE-based simulators in that there is no edit or run mode - the circuit is always simulating in transient mode so updates happen in real time. [1] https://icircuitapp.com/ https://icircuitapp.com/
vonnegut 4y ago
I am looking for something similar to this for a Raspberry Pi and Python. To allow students to work with the circuits/electronics without having to buy the hardware. Raspis are expensive now because of the microprocessor shortage.
orthecreedence 4y ago
I just prototyped a circuit using this: http://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html?startCircuit=ohms.txt http://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html?startCircuit=o... I didn't find it to be ancient at all, and when I put it on a breadboard it worked exactly as the simulator ran it. Very helpful.
your_challenger 4y ago
Is it so hard to buy an Arduino and a bunch of electronics components today? The simulation and its "3D" models seem finicky. And a lot les intuitive. A 2D simulator + an actual hardware would have taught me a lot more for lot less time.
nchudleigh 4y ago
Super cool.
whywhywouldyou 4y ago
Noted. I guess in the future I will continue to look for things made in 2003, because this is entirely useless for any actual circuit simulation and/or design. Looks great if you're trying to impress some of your beginner friends, though.
fromaj 4y ago
for anyone looking for something like this, especially for teaching - TinkerCAD has a circuits app that is extremely similar but without the janky 3D. https://www.tinkercad.com/circuits https://www.tinkercad.com/circuits
dingi 4y ago
Is this app even working? It crashes every time.
MexicanJoe 4y ago
I wish I understood electronics
- ur-whale 4y ago
  Here is a really nice resource to get started: https://www.youtube.com/@simplyput2796/videos https://www.youtube.com/@simplyput2796/videos
- jpoesen 4y ago
  You're in luck, friend. On the interweb you can learn anything, free of charge. Case in point: https://www.tinkercad.com/circuits https://www.tinkercad.com/circuits
donatj 4y ago
UI needs a lot of work to make basic tasks easier. I started from scratch and managed to build a simple blinking LED using a 555 but found the general process far more fiddly than need be. Took me almost 10 minutes to do what should have been seconds. Took me longer to do than it would have with a real breadboard in real life, which makes this thing a miss. Placing components correctly and in particular rotating components is very difficult. Running wires one end and at a time rather than just a click and drag felt very fiddly. Thing feels like a tech demo, not something I would hand a learner.
tempodox 4y ago
Since the title refers to how it looks, this thing looks more like a toy than a tool. Also, as far as it's up to me, I'll never use an app that requires me to “sign in”. I prefer to own the apps I use and retain full control over my data.
- frx 4y ago
  I agree with you but the website didn't ask me to sign in to use the app
- malerba118 4y ago
  You can literally edit and simulate the project while anonymous without any limitations. And then when you decide to sign up/sign in it will restore the changes you made while you were signed out and you can pick up where you left off. Is that still not enough? Also, it's completely free and we have no plans to do anything with your data. For real, i have no clue how to make it any easier/more enticing for you... This has been 3 months of painstaking work and you can't even be bothered to try it for free? Pretty insulting honestly and pretty hard to be an app developer these days as this mentality is becoming quite pervasive.
gauddasa 4y ago
I'm not able to see anything except the following message: Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).
iHateStylo 4y ago
This looks amazing and some of you really need to stop yelling at clouds. Not everything needs to be “boring and functional”, it’s ok for things to be just fun.
- sclangdon 4y ago
  Maybe, but a circuit designer is pretty high up the list of things that need to be boring and functional.
skykooler 4y ago
This spent thirty seconds with a spinning loading icon, switched my graphics card to the discrete graphics card, and then Firefox hard crashed to desktop. I think I prefer the 2003-era designs.
acutesoftware 4y ago
This is very cool, though as others have said it is fairly resource intensive. I'd love to see a schematic exported or even shown as you press simulate (you clearly have it the components and links in memory somewhere to do the simulation). This would be great for debugging.
benreesman 4y ago
Perhaps peripheral (the original site has been hugged to death). Both clashlang: https://clash-lang.org/ https://clash-lang.org/ And Hardcaml: https://github.com/janestreet/hardcaml https://github.com/janestreet/hardcaml have personally fueled my interest in hardware. Dan Luu speaks eloquently and at length about how better options are needed for logic design. I would recommend both of the above to the enthusiastic novice.
dncornholio 4y ago
Unusable on Macbook 2015. Completely freezes my system.
MaxikCZ 4y ago
please take the smoothing out. The smoothing of camera rotation, the smoothing of leds changing state... so annoying you cant try things like quickly pressing button or such
MohammadAZ 4y ago
Great find!
pkolaczk 4y ago
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.
- japanman425 4y ago
  Exactly. I was seeing a friend the other day who was using an ancient version of mastercam, version 8 I think. I looked at it and thought wow I need to update him to a later version. However after watching him use it it just all made sense. There were a few areas that could be improved, but it was so simple and clear to use.
- mickael-kerjean 4y ago
  On my laptop, chrome went down entirely as it was using 100% of the RAM, had to kill -9 it
- londons_explore 4y ago
  I'd like to see a study done of this kind of application, but removing all slowness. Perhaps you could run it on a $10k gaming rig, or pre-render all interactions or something to make all reactions instant. That should inform us of the real value of a lifelike 3D UI, separately from the effects of the jankiness that normally accompany them.
  - Kwpolska 4y ago
    This specific circuit simulator does have some performance-related jank, but even if you ignore it, you can easily see where it breaks down, for example: * If you look at the black/red wires going to the Arduino, they kind of overlap * If you swap the black/red wires (so that one of them has a shorter distance to cover), you get visual artifacts * It is trivial to make a wire unconnected while moving it to another hole (and instead just touching the plastic parts of the breadboard) * Making even the most trivial modifications (eg. putting 5V directly through the diode) requires a lot of dragging, rotating, panning, and zooming to get it done (but hey, at least there’s smoke if you actually do that) * There are many things that can go wrong, because the developers didn’t think about it; for example, the bottom power rails of the breadboard don’t actually work * Making a modification to a running circuit is impossible, and switching between design and simulation modes takes time and does not always remember the camera position All of those aren’t a problem in a 2D simulator. Some of them because the 2D simulator abstracts some things away better (eg. power sources or wires), some of them because the developers could invest more effort in the simulation logic, and some of them because the 3D simulator does a bad job at the real-life parts of it (eg. overlapping wires or putting the connector inside the hole).
duke360 4y ago
WHAAAATT??
atoav 4y ago
As someone who teaches electronics to people who are purely into it for the practical parts (artists) I think one of the main beginner challenges in electronics is the translation between the different representations of a circuit. 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.
- xattt 4y ago
  The best tool I ever used to learn about circuits was a Radio Shack electronics kit. It was something I could pick away at for years as kid, and eventually develop an intuitive sense for reading a schematic. I believe that Elenco continues to make a version of it: https://shop.elenco.com/consumers/electronic-playground-130.html https://shop.elenco.com/consumers/electronic-playground-130....
  - lbriner 4y ago
    Completely agree. This was my first practical kit. I bought one recently from John Lewis in the UK and they are very under-rated. A few $ worth of components but most importantly, a neat paper booklet with a tonne of example circuits including how to wire them on the spring posts. I would always recommend this as a start for young children before then going back to some theory and "why did this circuit behave this way"
forgotpwd16 4y ago
Seeing it's a complicated laggy (at least on my system) 3d, will go with one that looks if not actually made in 2003.
ineiti 4y ago
Replace the resistor of the LED with 0Ohm and switch the LED on. Nice animation :)
kreelman 4y ago
Very cool. I threw on a 9 volt power supply and attached a wire across both terminals and clicked "simulate"....... Smoke starts coming out of the battery. I wondered what it would do, nice it does that.
blacklion 4y ago
For me, circuit simulator / schematic capture tool (you can not have former without latter effectively, nobody creates netlists in text editor now) which look modern will use modern conventions about mouse and keyboard, which is well-known to anybody who tried at least one graphical editor. You now, left (primary) click for select, click-hold-and-move to move, right (secondary) click for context menu, this kind of stuff. Many PCB/Schematics/Simulation packages uses their own old conventions, which are alien to modern users, like "you must have to choose move tool, click on symbol, move, click to drop in new place" and so on. 3D, skeuomorphism, etc., looks nice in tutorials with 3-10 parts but are unusable after that.
meindnoch 4y ago
There are use cases where realistic 3D rendering improves the experience over 2D. Circuit simulation isn’t among them.
RektBoy 4y ago
Sorry, but this website is useless and clunky. I will stick to circuit simulator which looks like it was made in 2003. Anyway, thanks
RektBoy 4y ago
Is this some Gen Z meme? Like if its look old, it must be bad? I cringed a lot on this website. Clunky AF.
- citrin_ru 4y ago
  I don't think it is specific to Gen Z - it is common for any young people to seek novelty for the sake of novelty (and have bias against anything old). To some extent it is an implementation of explore-exploit strategy - one can try many different things when young and then settle on best seen things becoming older. The problem is that we cannot have usable GUI because GUI designers just cannot stop trying new things inflicting on everyone constant churn.
bjourne 4y ago
Am I doing something wrong? The page runs att like 0.01 fps in Firefox on my high end workstation.
incrudible 4y ago
Would be cool if it worked, unfortunately the "Hello World" (pressing the button to toggle the LED) already fails on my rather high-end system (and Firefox). Surely there is room for optimization as well. In terms of usability, the value I see is from being able to immediately recognize the various physical parts that one might find in their Arduino starter toolbox. For actual editing, I would prefer a different interface however.
benibela 4y ago
I actually made a circuit simulator for boolean operations in 2003
ur-whale 4y ago
Not sure how this is better than a simulator from 2003. Or even earlier for that matter. When this can do what LTSpice can do and show a nice 3D simulation with all the voltages in realtime at each node if one wants to see said simulation instead of traces, then yeah it'll be an improvement.
DoingIsLearning 4y ago
You will have to rip ngspice from my dead cold hands.
- defactoPun 4y ago
  You have my respect sir !
JCM9 4y ago
“Doesn’t look like it was made in 2003.” Sometimes in tech we don’t do a good job of recognizing that a problem is essentially “solved” and further “innovation” isn’t helping. The reason why stuff looked like “it was made in 2003” was because that essentially solved the problem. All the extra iterations on top of that arguably didn’t help. A lot could be said of many forms of web design too. The basic designs of the late 90s and early 2000s were very functional. A lot of the junk out there today looks flashy but is borderline terrible at actually communicating easily navigable information. There are good exceptions today, and to my point those are broadly things that didn’t try and reinvent the wheel through unnecessary “innovation” in “design.”
- theodric 4y ago
  Yes! Somebody had to say it! We thrive on novelty, especially people drawn to tech. With the pace of change in the early years of modern tech, making things constantly change appearance was natural and unavoidable, so we've come to expect it, but some things are eventually good enough. Chairs, sinks, toilets, plates-- there may be edge cases of radical divergences from their settled forms, but for the most part, they're stable and consistent.
- malerba118 4y ago
  Aesthetics aside, we're interweaving a wasm port of ngspice with a microcontroller simulator and running realtime simulations all in the browser which i would say is innovative in several ways
  - physPop 4y ago
    That's like saying "we're making it less performant and more fragile on purpose"
    - malerba118 4y ago
      We envision it going more like this: "here's an interactive simulation to illustrate my point <embed src="diode-url" />" instead of: "to see my point please download these files, download this version of ltspice, and then give it a run"
al2o3cr 4y ago
They're not wrong, a tool like this would have been totally impractical in 2003. For instance, it's currently consuming 70% of a 2.7GHz i7 core while idling with the demo project loaded; that would have MELTED a machine in 2003! :P
ThaFresh 4y ago
incredible, Ive often wondered why they were all so shit
ThaFresh 4y ago
incredible
inglor 4y ago
Wokwi does this pretty well
AcerbicZero 4y ago
Wow, this is so much worse than the other one, that looks like it was made in 2003. Hilarious.
hw-guy 4y ago
This one looks like it was made for children.
Archit3ch 4y ago
No automatic differentiation, no multiphysics, no symbolic reduction, no modern solvers, no GPU support for simulation, no parts library. Other than the UI, this looks closer to 2003 than 2022.

905 points by malerba118 4y ago

melony 4y ago

Are you using SPICE for the actual simulation?

CoffeePython 4y ago
Hey! I work on Diode w/ Austin (OP). Yeah we use a wasm-compiled version of ngSpice for the circuit simulation.
- etimberg 4y ago
  Cool! We did something similar when I was on the team that built multisim.com
  - tiagod 4y ago
    That's so cool that there's a web version now! I was introduced to multisim back in high-school and enjoyed that unit a lot, will play around with it on the weekend :)
- marmetio 4y ago
  How will Diode differentiate itself from TINA? They have 3D breadboard, web browser, microcontroller code simulation, PCB layout, equation extraction, etc. https://www.tina.com/edison/ https://www.tina.com/edison/
- kragen 4y ago
  presumably melony already knew that because ngspice is mostly licensed under a 3-clause bsd license which says > Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. unless you're violating the ngspice license? or the documentation and/or other materials are just hard to find? parts of ngspice are also licensed under gplv2, cc-by-sa-4.0, lgpl-2.1+, or gpl2+, but maybe you aren't using those parts
  - melony 4y ago
    Melony is not that pedantic and melony does not ask questions whose answers melony already know. Melony has better things to do than to hound SaaS services over alleged license violations (unlike a certain somebody).
    - kragen 4y ago
      perhaps if melony didn't know that, it is evidence that the required credit is, in effect, not being given; that the authors of this software are, in effect, passing off the work of the ngspice contributors as their own

IshKebab 4y ago

Pretty cool, though I would say that a breadboard is probably a worse UI for capturing circuits than whatever we had in 2003. But it is fair that e.g. LTspice has a terrible GUI. I always thought QUCS had the best UI of all the free options: https://qucs.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html https://qucs.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html Unfortunately it's not the most popular project.

malerba118 4y ago
3d does present some additional challenges, but we decided to go this route to reduce friction for beginners who might not understand how schematics or other abstract representations map to the real world circuits they're playing with
- duskwuff 4y ago
  I'm still not sure what the 3D aspect in particular adds, though. Tools which work with physical wiring diagrams, like Fritzing, have been available for ages, and I don't think the 2D nature of those tools has ever been a meaningful obstacle to understanding.
  - azalemeth 4y ago
    In my opinion, 3D is useful if: a) You want to check that your components won't physically bash into something else you care about b) You are designing something that operates at RF to mm-wave frequencies and need to worry (a lot) about the spatial location of the high-frequency components and nearby conductors / ground planes c) You want to get an idea about airflow and heat dissipation on power electronics and/or modules (such as power amplifiers) that come with their own heatsinks (some SIPs do!) Kicad and other bits of more hobby-orientated software that do a 3D render (such as diptrace) tend to do it for reasons (a) and (c). Software that does (b) properly costs hundreds of thousands of €$£ per year to rent and tends to have a UI that makes you scream with frustration at every possible moment.
    - duskwuff 4y ago

pugworthy 4y ago

Ah skeuomorphism my old friend. So good to see you!

musicale 4y ago
Is that you Scott Forstall?

mtreis86 4y ago

Are there any inductors or transformers? I don't see any on the left parts panel. I want to make an oscillator.

gumboza 4y ago
That's where the whole thing falls apart with these things usually. Oscillators are quite difficult to simulate because they require less than ideal startup conditions i.e. noise, voltage gradients to get going. While the SPICE engine underneath does support that, you can't really expect someone wiring up a breadboard to be completely aware of the nuances around simulation vs reality. This got to a point that Bob Pease of legendary analogue design fame, chucked a computer off a roof https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrZ_fMqd8k8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrZ_fMqd8k8
- kragen 4y ago
  also if your oscillator's q is high it can take a terribly long time in simulation to start oscillating
malerba118 4y ago
Not currently, but useful feedback for us!

proee 4y ago

This is great for learning - you should consider a mode that switches to traditional schematic view so people can understand the corresponding circuit.

steve_adams_86 4y ago
I believe another web-based tool which can do this already is https://www.flux.ai https://www.flux.ai I've noodled around with it and I like it, but I actually find working with pencil, paper, and the actual components to be more efficient than panning and zooming around a 3d environment. It's not always an option so these simulators are very useful, but I've come to realize I'm far better off by planning not to use these tools, I guess.
- built_with_flux 4y ago
  flux founder here thanks for the plug! We are working on making our schematic editor so good...you'll never go back to paper :)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - steve_adams_86 4y ago
    I’m realizing I didn’t give flux the credit I should have. I actually interviewed to work on it because as far as I can tell, this stuff is the future. So that aside, it doesn’t fit my workflow well today but I don’t doubt that it will, and for many people it already does. I’m glad to hear good things are coming! I’ll definitely keep checking in. Apologies for being dismissive of the hard work your team does, especially after seeing the kinds of technical challenges you take on and working with similar technologies myself these days. High performance, user-friendly collaborative tools in the browser are not a free lunch, and what flux does today is already impressive.
    - rock_hard 4y ago

Kwpolska 4y ago

The competition might look ancient, but IMO, a 2D interface would be much more productive and easier to work with. This site is completely unusable for me in Firefox (it does work in Edge though).

Taniwha 4y ago
doesn't seem to work on chrome either
- CoffeePython 4y ago
  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.
  - Taniwha 4y ago
    latest linux chrome Version 108.0.5359.124 (Official Build) (64-bit) on ubuntu latest LTS, directly from google (not in a snap). Starts up but central window just has a rotating loading icon that never goes away
- jakear 4y ago
  Do you perhaps have "Advanced Security" mode enabled, where JIT is disabled for new sites? Site was super jank at first but once I added it to my exception list it was buttery on my M1.
CoffeePython 4y ago
Yeah on my machine it's a lot slower using Firefox than chrome. We can investigate and see why it's happening. Also I do agree that 2D interface is probably important to add at some point too! I think right now the skeuomorphism is nice for folks wanting to get their hands dirty with circuit projects but don't have all the materials/supplies available for whatever reason (cost/space/etc)
- 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

oscillonoscope 4y ago

Nice idea but it's not very useful without net names or a schematic view. A nice looking UI isn't good if it's not functional

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jonathankoren 4y ago

Skeuomorphism? No thanks. I’d rather keep the circuit plan clear.

pkstn 4y ago

Wow, so awesome!

gumboza 4y ago

I want 2003. That's the last time anything worked. LTspice for example. Edit: worth nothing there is a native macOS port of LTspice now.

coupdejarnac 4y ago
LTspice still works great afaik. I use it on Linux with Wine.
- rahen 4y ago
  Have a look at Qucs-S for a native, usable Spice on Linux: https://ra3xdh.github.io https://ra3xdh.github.io It's still missing a comprehensive component library like LTspice does though, contributions are welcome. KiCad can also simulate circuits through NGSpice, but it's missing a library and suffers from a lot of quirks.
antegamisou 4y ago
> I want 2003. That's the last time anything worked. This. NI Multisim is one of my [proprietary] favorites too.
- teleforce 4y ago
  Just wondering can Multisim integrate seamlessly with Ultiboard for circuit emulation since both of them now under NI? I know that Proteus simulator can perform the emulation to some extent.
Arubis 4y ago
LTspice at least had a gui! I remember sketching schematics by hand, marking up nodes with names, then feeding plaintext into PSpice. But it worked great!
- gumboza 4y ago
  Yes indeed. I used to do that on a Sun workstation back in the 1990s as well. Then go and make some tea while the simulation was running.

SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago

Schematics are for understanding what a circuit does. Breadboards are for prototyping small low-speed circuits. Veroboard is for prototyping larger medium-speed circuits. Gerbers & a PCB are for production and for prototyping large or high-speed circuits. If the tool could automatically make a 3D breadboard view from a schematic, it'd be pretty neat for beginners. If the tool warned you when the normal parasitic capacitance between breadboard rows would cause problems with a part you're using, that'd be amazing for teaching.

guerrilla 4y ago
Fritzing can kind of make breadboards from schematics, but doesn't have a 3D view... which I'm fine with because why do we need 3D?
- dylan604 4y ago
  >which I'm fine with because why do we need 3D? James Cameron would like a word with you. Seriously though, 3D can show off some things that just might not be realized without it. Not sure of Fritzing's design abilities with layered PCBs, but I could imagine trying to design a layered board and forgetting how tall a component is. Seeing a component "through" the second layer could be useful
  - app4soft 4y ago
    Fritzing is more like 2,5D.[0] [0] https://blog.fritzing.org/2022/06/27/Simulating-Circuits-with-Fritzing https://blog.fritzing.org/2022/06/27/Simulating-Circuits-wit...
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    If your circuit is so complex that you need a breadboard planner and even an fully 3D visualization you have a big problem and you should not be breadboarding but ordering a PCB.
- AceJohnny2 4y ago
  > because why do we need 3D? Teaching is much easier when the students can connect the abstract representation to something they can experience.

heywherelogingo 4y ago

The ones from 2003 worked - this is mostly blank and does nothing.

CoffeePython 4y ago
looks like our db went down for a few minutes when you were trying it out! Sorry about that!
malerba118 4y ago
this combines spice simulations with microcontroller simulations
- kragen 4y ago
  for me it combines a blank white page with no error message with some buttons at the top that don't do anything
- blacklion 4y ago
  Proteus mixed mode simulation is here from... let me look it up... 1996! 26 years for now. And it looks modern enough for me.

tkanarsky 4y ago

Tiny nit: the labels on the Arduino headers are z-fighting when zoomed out -- maybe offset them a bit to counter loss of precision?

revenga99 4y ago

Man the circuit simulators I had to use at university a couple of years ago were old. They were in color and the TA's told me that was a big deal.

bitwize 4y ago
16 colors at 640x480 resolution! VGA graphics are the future!

antegamisou 4y ago

Also check out TARGET 3001! for a 3D view mode https://ibfriedrich.com/en/index.html https://ibfriedrich.com/en/index.html

mdswanson 4y ago

CRUMB Circuit Simulator too: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198800/CRUMB_Circuit_Simulator/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198800/CRUMB_Circuit_Sim...

onirom 4y ago

Is there some tools like this which can simulate old school stuff such as magnetic core memory ?

godelski 4y ago

It sure is pretty, but there's a critical issue. Components can have their pins labeled, but this is done in the 3D environment. Just place them down on the right side. There's plenty of white space there. No one wants to rotate a component around like that and strain their head to read. I'm literally just going to pull up Google and get the schematic there. You have the information but it is displayed in a way that is hostile to the user. I can't even see where pin 1 is without this view because there's no marker like we'd see on a standard real life component.

CoffeePython 4y ago
Great feedback, we've chatted a bit about this internally already. It's something we'll likely add. In general we're looking for ways to make it easier to see pinouts/voltages/current/etc. Thanks for sharing!
- godelski 4y ago
  Great to hear. It's hard to put your work out there and you did a good job. User interfaces are hard. What's obvious to some is hostile to others lol

Stevvo 4y ago

Nice touch that you can fry a LED, but unfortunately I couldn't get the Arduino to fry; it's the expensive part and the one I would want to run a simulation to make sure I will not destroy.

CoffeePython 4y ago
oh most've missed adding that in. we'll make sure you can let the magic smoke out of the arduino if you fry it too lol

bandyaboot 4y ago

I’ll take 2003 design over something that looks like it was designed by Apple for iOS circa 2010.

Kiboneu 4y ago

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/ 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.

laveur 4y ago
I use this a lot for quickly testing things out when I am not entirely sure what I need. It's incredibly powerful, and give you scopes so you can verify things work. It may be very old and look ancient by modern standards but it's much more usable for me. Also I don't need sonmething to simulate an Arduino, I need something to say test a op-amp summing amplifier.
- kragen 4y ago
  the simulation blows up sometimes it doesn't look ancient to me
IIAOPSW 4y ago
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?
- alphabetter 4y ago
  I've contributed quite a lot to Paul's simulator, including doing the port so it runs natively in the browser. 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.

gnramires 4y ago

There's a similar product at https://wokwi.com/ 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/ 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 numerical backend (that can give error guarantees) would also be nice, you kind of have to tinker with time steps in some cases.

malerba118 4y ago
Wokwi is an awesome tool! We're actually using wokwi's open-sourced avr simulator to power arduinos in diode. One thing wokwi doesn't do however is analog simulation so we're hoping to combine spice simulations with arduino, rpi, esp32, etc.
- gnramires 4y ago
  Indeed, mixed signal simulations would be very useful, I reckon, for people dealing with sensors and that kind of stuff. Might as well simulate it before building it. It's currently possible with falstad's open source code base as well, you just have to program inputs and outputs but it's not very ergonomical let's put it that way. In any case, I always encourage trying to be as open as you can with the software, this encourages collaboration/cooperation (and of course is just better for everyone, in most cases!). I think (like others here) any slightly more advanced user would be more comfortable/productive in a 2D interface most of the time. But the option of having 3D for blinkenlights is sure nice :) (also a great accessibility for people who can't afford to buy hardware for learning and experimentation but have access to a computer)
alphabetter 4y ago
I did the port of Paul's sim so that it runs natively in the browser instead of needing a Java plug-in (remember them) and made various other contributions. 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.

app4soft 4y ago

Recent and related: Diode: Build, program, and simulate hardware projects in the browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33396792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33396792 (26 comments)

pifm_guy 4y ago

A similar project: CircuitJS: https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html I couldn't compare to OP because it timed out loading on my slow internet.

avsteele 4y ago

This seems pretty cool, esp for a newbie to know how to put down a circuit. I use http://www.circuitlab.com http://www.circuitlab.com and find it to be quite good for laying down parts and doing simulation including time-dependence and with parameters. Very reasonably priced IMO.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

franky47 4y ago

For a more schematic + signal analysis, less breadboard IRL approach, EveryCircuit is just as good looking. https://everycircuit.com/ https://everycircuit.com/

justaj 4y ago

This looks amazing, but I wish the UI would have been a little more light-weight. I'm running on 100% CPU in Chromium on my Thinkpad X220.

RodgerTheGreat 4y ago
Lightweight UIs sound pretty 2003. Can't have that.
sgt 4y ago
Looks great, but yes, this is pretty unusable due to the high CPU usage. Also on Chromium.

beambot 4y ago

Circuit Lab (https://www.circuitlab.com/ https://www.circuitlab.com/) has been my go-to for a while...

dismalpedigree 4y ago

Check out https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198800/CRUMB_Circuit_Simulator/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198800/CRUMB_Circuit_Sim... also. Excellent UI.

aifer4 4y ago

This is a great technical demonstration of how to visualize a circuit board. But I would rather walk over hot coals than try to actually design a circuit using this interface. Circuits can be represented very nicely in two dimensions, which is convenient given that computer screens are two dimensional. For things which are fundamentally 3D (e.g. models of objects) it can be useful for design purposes to have a 3D visualization, but this doesn't seem to be the case with circuits.

kragen 4y ago

what I really want is a circuit simulator that doesn't look like it was made in 02003 because it looks like it was made in 01963 the aesthetics and clarity of the schematics of a tektronix oscilloscope manual from 01963 plus the instant responsivity of the actual 01963 tektronix oscilloscope; but married with the flexibility, generality, reproducibility, and monte carlo capabilities you can get out of modern teraflops desktop hardware, with the scriptability of emacs and the breadth of simulation models you can get in ltspice, and of course not limited to 10 megahertz i guess it's true that this simulator doesn't look like it was made in 02003 because, after taking several minutes to load, it just displays a blank white page with buttons that don't do anything circuit simulators almost never did that in 02003, though i guess berkeley spice sort of does until you read its man page apparently from the other comments it's supposed to be a thing with some kind of 3-d model of a breadboard though? why would you want that? the reason we usually draw schematics before putting together breadboards, and we show each other schematics instead of breadboards, is because breadboards are a terrible user interface for circuits; schematics are much easier to understand because you can organize your components logically instead of being constrained by how things are packaged, and also you can tell what the components are by looking at them let me recommend a circuit simulator which, though lacking in some ways (especially realistic component simulation and integration with spice and kicad), takes advantage of the possibilities of computers to do better than paper schematics instead of worse: http://falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html http://falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html

musicale 4y ago
Still trying to solve that Y10K problem I see.
- kragen 4y ago
  it's slow going, but fortunately we still have a significant amount of time left
  - classified 4y ago
    But it's invalid. Octal doesn't allow digits above 7.

panzi 4y ago

Looks very nice, but on my old PC with my new 4k monitor it is unusable. It would be cool if it could render at half resolution (quarter the number of pixels) during animation and only when animation ends render one frame at full resolution.

quickthrower2 4y ago

Yes, it simulates blowing stuff up. Run this and wait: https://www.withdiode.com/projects/03af8e77-ff1b-4304-b1dd-de1f5f90bf33 https://www.withdiode.com/projects/03af8e77-ff1b-4304-b1dd-d...

defactoPun 4y ago
Only thing I miss now is that burnt LED smell xD
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Worth the day it will take off your life expectancy!

hgsgm 4y ago

anothernewdude 4y ago

Just made me wish it wasn't chugging to render the 3D.

scott_h 4y ago

Guess what component a simulator named diode that doesn't have...

scott_h 4y ago

Guess what component a simulator named diode doesn't have...

rickreynoldssf 4y ago

This does nothing but spike my CPU. :(

mrtweetyhack 4y ago

ralusek 4y ago

Pretty awesome, thanks for building this.

blobbers 4y ago

Yay b2logic!

oillio 4y ago

I hate to be a hater but, this is so skeuomorphic I would just rather use a physical breadboard

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jesselawson 4y ago

I'm sorry about all the negativity in the comments. What I see is something that was handcrafted with the careful touch of a craftsperson that represents your individual vision for a specific digital experience. I can tell you put a lot of time into making this. Thank you for sharing this!

paleogizmo 4y ago

For a nice, polished, non-skeuomorphic circuit simulator, see iCircuit [1], which provides native MacOS and iOS clients (based on the Falstad JS circuit simulator mentioned elsewhere in this thread, if I recall correctly). It differs from most SPICE-based simulators in that there is no edit or run mode - the circuit is always simulating in transient mode so updates happen in real time. [1] https://icircuitapp.com/ https://icircuitapp.com/

vonnegut 4y ago

I am looking for something similar to this for a Raspberry Pi and Python. To allow students to work with the circuits/electronics without having to buy the hardware. Raspis are expensive now because of the microprocessor shortage.

orthecreedence 4y ago

I just prototyped a circuit using this: http://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html?startCircuit=ohms.txt http://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html?startCircuit=o... I didn't find it to be ancient at all, and when I put it on a breadboard it worked exactly as the simulator ran it. Very helpful.

your_challenger 4y ago

Is it so hard to buy an Arduino and a bunch of electronics components today? The simulation and its "3D" models seem finicky. And a lot les intuitive. A 2D simulator + an actual hardware would have taught me a lot more for lot less time.

nchudleigh 4y ago

Super cool.

whywhywouldyou 4y ago

Noted. I guess in the future I will continue to look for things made in 2003, because this is entirely useless for any actual circuit simulation and/or design. Looks great if you're trying to impress some of your beginner friends, though.

fromaj 4y ago

for anyone looking for something like this, especially for teaching - TinkerCAD has a circuits app that is extremely similar but without the janky 3D. https://www.tinkercad.com/circuits https://www.tinkercad.com/circuits

dingi 4y ago

Is this app even working? It crashes every time.

MexicanJoe 4y ago

I wish I understood electronics

ur-whale 4y ago
Here is a really nice resource to get started: https://www.youtube.com/@simplyput2796/videos https://www.youtube.com/@simplyput2796/videos
jpoesen 4y ago
You're in luck, friend. On the interweb you can learn anything, free of charge. Case in point: https://www.tinkercad.com/circuits https://www.tinkercad.com/circuits

donatj 4y ago

UI needs a lot of work to make basic tasks easier. I started from scratch and managed to build a simple blinking LED using a 555 but found the general process far more fiddly than need be. Took me almost 10 minutes to do what should have been seconds. Took me longer to do than it would have with a real breadboard in real life, which makes this thing a miss. Placing components correctly and in particular rotating components is very difficult. Running wires one end and at a time rather than just a click and drag felt very fiddly. Thing feels like a tech demo, not something I would hand a learner.

tempodox 4y ago

Since the title refers to how it looks, this thing looks more like a toy than a tool. Also, as far as it's up to me, I'll never use an app that requires me to “sign in”. I prefer to own the apps I use and retain full control over my data.

frx 4y ago
I agree with you but the website didn't ask me to sign in to use the app
malerba118 4y ago
You can literally edit and simulate the project while anonymous without any limitations. And then when you decide to sign up/sign in it will restore the changes you made while you were signed out and you can pick up where you left off. Is that still not enough? Also, it's completely free and we have no plans to do anything with your data. For real, i have no clue how to make it any easier/more enticing for you... This has been 3 months of painstaking work and you can't even be bothered to try it for free? Pretty insulting honestly and pretty hard to be an app developer these days as this mentality is becoming quite pervasive.

gauddasa 4y ago

I'm not able to see anything except the following message: Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).

iHateStylo 4y ago

This looks amazing and some of you really need to stop yelling at clouds. Not everything needs to be “boring and functional”, it’s ok for things to be just fun.

sclangdon 4y ago
Maybe, but a circuit designer is pretty high up the list of things that need to be boring and functional.

skykooler 4y ago

This spent thirty seconds with a spinning loading icon, switched my graphics card to the discrete graphics card, and then Firefox hard crashed to desktop. I think I prefer the 2003-era designs.

acutesoftware 4y ago

This is very cool, though as others have said it is fairly resource intensive. I'd love to see a schematic exported or even shown as you press simulate (you clearly have it the components and links in memory somewhere to do the simulation). This would be great for debugging.

benreesman 4y ago

Perhaps peripheral (the original site has been hugged to death). Both clashlang: https://clash-lang.org/ https://clash-lang.org/ And Hardcaml: https://github.com/janestreet/hardcaml https://github.com/janestreet/hardcaml have personally fueled my interest in hardware. Dan Luu speaks eloquently and at length about how better options are needed for logic design. I would recommend both of the above to the enthusiastic novice.

dncornholio 4y ago

Unusable on Macbook 2015. Completely freezes my system.

MaxikCZ 4y ago

please take the smoothing out. The smoothing of camera rotation, the smoothing of leds changing state... so annoying you cant try things like quickly pressing button or such

MohammadAZ 4y ago

Great find!

pkolaczk 4y ago

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.

japanman425 4y ago
Exactly. I was seeing a friend the other day who was using an ancient version of mastercam, version 8 I think. I looked at it and thought wow I need to update him to a later version. However after watching him use it it just all made sense. There were a few areas that could be improved, but it was so simple and clear to use.
mickael-kerjean 4y ago
On my laptop, chrome went down entirely as it was using 100% of the RAM, had to kill -9 it
londons_explore 4y ago
I'd like to see a study done of this kind of application, but removing all slowness. Perhaps you could run it on a $10k gaming rig, or pre-render all interactions or something to make all reactions instant. That should inform us of the real value of a lifelike 3D UI, separately from the effects of the jankiness that normally accompany them.
- Kwpolska 4y ago
  This specific circuit simulator does have some performance-related jank, but even if you ignore it, you can easily see where it breaks down, for example: * If you look at the black/red wires going to the Arduino, they kind of overlap * If you swap the black/red wires (so that one of them has a shorter distance to cover), you get visual artifacts * It is trivial to make a wire unconnected while moving it to another hole (and instead just touching the plastic parts of the breadboard) * Making even the most trivial modifications (eg. putting 5V directly through the diode) requires a lot of dragging, rotating, panning, and zooming to get it done (but hey, at least there’s smoke if you actually do that) * There are many things that can go wrong, because the developers didn’t think about it; for example, the bottom power rails of the breadboard don’t actually work * Making a modification to a running circuit is impossible, and switching between design and simulation modes takes time and does not always remember the camera position All of those aren’t a problem in a 2D simulator. Some of them because the 2D simulator abstracts some things away better (eg. power sources or wires), some of them because the developers could invest more effort in the simulation logic, and some of them because the 3D simulator does a bad job at the real-life parts of it (eg. overlapping wires or putting the connector inside the hole).

duke360 4y ago

WHAAAATT??

atoav 4y ago

As someone who teaches electronics to people who are purely into it for the practical parts (artists) I think one of the main beginner challenges in electronics is the translation between the different representations of a circuit. 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.

xattt 4y ago
The best tool I ever used to learn about circuits was a Radio Shack electronics kit. It was something I could pick away at for years as kid, and eventually develop an intuitive sense for reading a schematic. I believe that Elenco continues to make a version of it: https://shop.elenco.com/consumers/electronic-playground-130.html https://shop.elenco.com/consumers/electronic-playground-130....
- lbriner 4y ago
  Completely agree. This was my first practical kit. I bought one recently from John Lewis in the UK and they are very under-rated. A few $ worth of components but most importantly, a neat paper booklet with a tonne of example circuits including how to wire them on the spring posts. I would always recommend this as a start for young children before then going back to some theory and "why did this circuit behave this way"

forgotpwd16 4y ago

Seeing it's a complicated laggy (at least on my system) 3d, will go with one that looks if not actually made in 2003.

ineiti 4y ago

Replace the resistor of the LED with 0Ohm and switch the LED on. Nice animation :)

kreelman 4y ago

Very cool. I threw on a 9 volt power supply and attached a wire across both terminals and clicked "simulate"....... Smoke starts coming out of the battery. I wondered what it would do, nice it does that.

blacklion 4y ago

For me, circuit simulator / schematic capture tool (you can not have former without latter effectively, nobody creates netlists in text editor now) which look modern will use modern conventions about mouse and keyboard, which is well-known to anybody who tried at least one graphical editor. You now, left (primary) click for select, click-hold-and-move to move, right (secondary) click for context menu, this kind of stuff. Many PCB/Schematics/Simulation packages uses their own old conventions, which are alien to modern users, like "you must have to choose move tool, click on symbol, move, click to drop in new place" and so on. 3D, skeuomorphism, etc., looks nice in tutorials with 3-10 parts but are unusable after that.

meindnoch 4y ago

There are use cases where realistic 3D rendering improves the experience over 2D. Circuit simulation isn’t among them.

RektBoy 4y ago

Sorry, but this website is useless and clunky. I will stick to circuit simulator which looks like it was made in 2003. Anyway, thanks

RektBoy 4y ago

Is this some Gen Z meme? Like if its look old, it must be bad? I cringed a lot on this website. Clunky AF.

citrin_ru 4y ago
I don't think it is specific to Gen Z - it is common for any young people to seek novelty for the sake of novelty (and have bias against anything old). To some extent it is an implementation of explore-exploit strategy - one can try many different things when young and then settle on best seen things becoming older. The problem is that we cannot have usable GUI because GUI designers just cannot stop trying new things inflicting on everyone constant churn.

bjourne 4y ago

Am I doing something wrong? The page runs att like 0.01 fps in Firefox on my high end workstation.

incrudible 4y ago

Would be cool if it worked, unfortunately the "Hello World" (pressing the button to toggle the LED) already fails on my rather high-end system (and Firefox). Surely there is room for optimization as well. In terms of usability, the value I see is from being able to immediately recognize the various physical parts that one might find in their Arduino starter toolbox. For actual editing, I would prefer a different interface however.

benibela 4y ago

I actually made a circuit simulator for boolean operations in 2003

ur-whale 4y ago

Not sure how this is better than a simulator from 2003. Or even earlier for that matter. When this can do what LTSpice can do and show a nice 3D simulation with all the voltages in realtime at each node if one wants to see said simulation instead of traces, then yeah it'll be an improvement.

DoingIsLearning 4y ago

You will have to rip ngspice from my dead cold hands.

defactoPun 4y ago
You have my respect sir !

JCM9 4y ago

“Doesn’t look like it was made in 2003.” Sometimes in tech we don’t do a good job of recognizing that a problem is essentially “solved” and further “innovation” isn’t helping. The reason why stuff looked like “it was made in 2003” was because that essentially solved the problem. All the extra iterations on top of that arguably didn’t help. A lot could be said of many forms of web design too. The basic designs of the late 90s and early 2000s were very functional. A lot of the junk out there today looks flashy but is borderline terrible at actually communicating easily navigable information. There are good exceptions today, and to my point those are broadly things that didn’t try and reinvent the wheel through unnecessary “innovation” in “design.”

theodric 4y ago
Yes! Somebody had to say it! We thrive on novelty, especially people drawn to tech. With the pace of change in the early years of modern tech, making things constantly change appearance was natural and unavoidable, so we've come to expect it, but some things are eventually good enough. Chairs, sinks, toilets, plates-- there may be edge cases of radical divergences from their settled forms, but for the most part, they're stable and consistent.
malerba118 4y ago
Aesthetics aside, we're interweaving a wasm port of ngspice with a microcontroller simulator and running realtime simulations all in the browser which i would say is innovative in several ways
- physPop 4y ago
  That's like saying "we're making it less performant and more fragile on purpose"
  - malerba118 4y ago
    We envision it going more like this: "here's an interactive simulation to illustrate my point <embed src="diode-url" />" instead of: "to see my point please download these files, download this version of ltspice, and then give it a run"

al2o3cr 4y ago

They're not wrong, a tool like this would have been totally impractical in 2003. For instance, it's currently consuming 70% of a 2.7GHz i7 core while idling with the demo project loaded; that would have MELTED a machine in 2003! :P

ThaFresh 4y ago

incredible, Ive often wondered why they were all so shit

ThaFresh 4y ago

incredible

inglor 4y ago

Wokwi does this pretty well

AcerbicZero 4y ago

Wow, this is so much worse than the other one, that looks like it was made in 2003. Hilarious.

hw-guy 4y ago

This one looks like it was made for children.

Archit3ch 4y ago

No automatic differentiation, no multiphysics, no symbolic reduction, no modern solvers, no GPU support for simulation, no parts library. Other than the UI, this looks closer to 2003 than 2022.