16 ms·
Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware
- dorongrinstein 8mo agowow. looks amazing
- svennidal 8mo agoLooks great, but pretty difficult to work with. Would be nice to be able to switch to top view to see more clearly where you're plugging things.
- goodcanadian 8mo agoYou can click the background and drag to rotate the view
- lnenad 8mo agoIt's still clunky though. It's a great, cool thing that OP built but just not very practical.
- svennidal 8mo agoLooks great, but pretty difficult to work with. Would be nice to be able to switch to top view to see more clearly where you're plugging things. Edit: Clicking the background and dragging it actually gave me the top view I was looking for. Thank you goodcanadian. That said, I still think this application is a better skillset demo than a practical tool to use.
- NooneAtAll3 8mo agolacks exception catching for when webgl is disabled
- zkmon 8mo agoSuper cool. Wonder if we can input the circuit as code.
- bandrami 8mo agoThere used to be some really good web-based SPICE interpreters but I can't find them now. This was before javascript ate everything, so you would enter the netlist, click a button, and get a GIF or the current at a specified terminal or whatever
- eqvinox 8mo agoWell, SPICE is still around in its zillion forks and dialects… AIUI the best frontend is kicad, though I never really tried that, I just wrote the text files by hand.
- eqvinox 8mo ago> Wonder if we can input the circuit as code. SPICE. You're describing SPICE. :)
- d-us-vb 8mo agoAs others have mentioned, SPICE is the traditional answer to that question. But SPICE feels more like a macro-assembler for circuits. One project that comes to mind for high-level programming style circuits-as-code: https://github.com/atopile/atopile https://github.com/atopile/atopile Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39263854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39263854 More recent HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44548449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44548449
- numpad0 8mo agoNo one realistically speak SVG. Human consciousness isn't a software built on language. Speech center is just a part of a human brain.
- PunchyHamster 8mo agothe 3D look is cool but makes it harder to put stuff together
- fercircularbuf 8mo agoThis is really terrific!!!
- shakna 8mo agoHoly requests, batman. ... Why so many requests for a static asset?
- dgxyz 8mo agoI appreciated that smoke comes out of the battery if you short it :) Edit: I am ex EE. I will note that it's horrible using this view. It is marginally more horrible than using breadboards in reality. Schematics exist because reality tends to suck or have inconsistencies. For example TO-99 packages come in different pin orders, so 2N3904 has the opposite order to a BC547. Also breadboards tend not to have full length bus bars depending on vendors. At least though in this form it's an ideal representation though which doesn't have parasitic capacitors, inductors, dodgy contacts and no ground plane all over it. It is good fun though :)
- buescher 8mo agoSchematics also help explain your circuit because the idioms of drawing them communicate intent. Which is one of the things the Shenzhen/Ladyada/Sparkfun/SeedStudio crowd don't get with their "schematic as data entry for layout" style. Some of them should know better. Breadboards make me wince a little especially in a professional setting but I've made my peace with dev boards that come with DIP-style pins for them. Decent breadboards are so cheap now that every dev board get to live on its own permanent breadboard.
- JKCalhoun 8mo ago"…schematic as data entry for layout style…" Maybe you can explain. Are you saying in these cases often the physical PCB layout follows the geometry of the schematic?
- buescher 8mo agoI mean when they put parts down on the schematic and just attach net names to them. You know, the pull-up resistors in the corner with named nets on them, not shown attached to particular pins or buses. Usually with a dotted box drawn around them. Frequently horizontal. Also usually totally implicit power routing. And no one that draws schematics that way has ever learned the value of drawing IC symbols to fit the circuit as opposed to the physical pinning of the device.
- 8mo ago
- bandrami 8mo agoOK the smoke was really funny
- seanthemon 8mo agoA more mature version of this is "CRUMB" found on steam, it costs money but it's got a lot of great features.
- WalterGR 8mo agohttps://www.crumbsim.com/ https://www.crumbsim.com/ Steam: 78% positive reviews out of 675. $8.99. Windows-only, though the website says “CRUMB is available for iOS and Android along side its desktop counterparts on Windows and MacOS.” https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198800/CRUMB_Circuit_Simulator/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198800/CRUMB_Circuit_Sim... No affiliation.
- superxpro12 8mo agointeresting. how does this compare with more "industrial" sims like "proteus" https://www.labcenter.com/simulation/ https://www.labcenter.com/simulation/ ? No affiliation with any. I'm a Comp.E in consumer electronics who likes to keep a pulse on these things.
- KeplerBoy 8mo agoNot a fan. The standard schematic abstraction is great and actually helps us parse circuits. Don't add unnecessary complexity just because AIs are good at vibecoding threejs demos (edit: even if this particular demo seems to predate vibecoding and was likely used for training instead of being the product of inference).
- globular-toast 8mo agoGot to agree. This is kind of pointless. Breadboards exist to make it easier to build physical circuits. I would also argue there is paedagogical value in actually playing with a physical breadboard. Having to physically orient things in 3D space is a small price you pay for building a physical prototype. This is all the downsides with none of the upsides.
- icedrift 8mo agoOn the contrary, when I was in high school we had one class dedicated to digital electronics and it revolved around breadboard circuitry. You only had 30 minutes/day to tinker with the physical hardware then it had to be disassembled for the next class. Simulations like this are more approachable then schematics and would have been great for tinkering outside of class.
- lm28469 8mo ago[flagged]
- yusucan 8mo agodude this thing is older than vibecoding. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=withdiode.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=withdiode.com
- post-it 8mo agoHey man, I've seen you posting salty comments a lot recently. Are you sure you're getting a positive experience out of this forum? I spend a lot of time online and when I start posting the way you do, I find that a day or two of minimizing screen time does wonders.
- lm28469 8mo agoIt's very positive don't worry about me, if you need a safe space echo chamber feel free to ignore me!
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- fileyfood500 8mo agoInteresting if there could be automated circuit designs through it
- wasmainiac 8mo agoThis was done before, years ago, but in 2D. I forget what it was called. It was like an LT Spice clone with better UX.
- unglaublich 8mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzing
- wasmainiac 8mo agoThat’s it, but I was also thinking about https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html
- fra 8mo agoThis was my first thought: this seems like a web + 3d port of Fritzing. Perhaps they even reuse some of the code?
- 1e1a 8mo agoI feel like the fade-in animation when starting/stopping the simulation takes too long. Also, I think it would be helpful if the currently connected row was highlighted when dragging a pin.
- sschueller 8mo agoLol, it simulates magic smoke as well.
- 00zer00 8mo agoNice, reminds me of https://wokwi.com/ https://wokwi.com/ .
- thinking_cactus 8mo agoAlso the amazing https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html
- krupan 8mo agoNice! You can play Electroboom without actually getting shocked. If you do want the real world experience you can get bags full of components on Amazon for pretty cheap
- myself248 8mo agoThe simulation needs an "Amazon factor" slider, which randomly makes: * All breadboard wires have some resistance * Some breadboard wires have very high resistance * Some breadboard wires have intermittent contact, recalculated every time components are added/removed from the breadboard * Some fraction of polarized capacitors are backwards * All capacitors are overrated for voltage and explode at 70-99% of their rating * Some LEDs smoke at 10% of their rated forward current * Brightness variation between LEDs that should be identical * Semiconductors may randomly be another semiconductor in the same class (e.g. a "2n2222" may in fact be any other NPN BJT in the simulation, or the parameters may be entirely random) * Inductors have 80% variation in core saturation specs, but other parameters are spot-on * Any component with writable flash (eg USB vid/pid strings) may randomly not actually have writable flash but instead fixed strings and the writes fake success but the values do not change
- buescher 8mo agoBetter simulators can do parameter sweeps and monte carlo simulations so you can explore tolerance stackup issues. But most of the failure modes you've listed there are just why you shouldn't build your circuits for one on breadboards and for another with dodgy parts sourced outside of distribution channels.
- hippich 8mo agoAre there similar solutions without 3d view? I want to get a simulator that can show me what is going in the circuit, ideally slowed down a lot. For example I was making a dongle with resistor and capacitor which was delivering a pulse-short (i.e. removing power for a short period of time instead of delivering an impulse) and while I was able to confirm overall idea with some online simulator, dialing in capacitance and resistance required physically switching components. Ideally I want to be able simulate such transient effects and arrive at specific numbers ready to be soldered. And I want it to be free/open-sourse ideally :)
- buescher 8mo agoSome people like Everycircuit and Falstad for that.
- pedro_caetano 8mo agoSounds like you are looking for a SPICE like simulator, there are quite a few free/open: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_electronics_circuit_simulators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_electronics_circu...
- a-dub 8mo agoorcad is the commercial classic for doing schematics with a spice backend. (spice is an oss engine out of berkeley for simulating circuits on computers. for dc it just solves the classic nodal analysis and for ac you can feed in things from a fantasy signal generator and capture things at various nodes in the circuit) there's also some pretty cool looking commercial web thing now that also will maintain netlists with real-time prices and will let you swap parts out and set minimum quantities etc. kicad is the oss orcad, but i never got good at it. (to be fair, orcad was weird to learn as well)
- asynchronous13 8mo agoI think altium has taken over as the top tier commercial offering in this space. I always disliked Orcad. Especially because cadence had excellent software that predated OrCAD, and for reasons that I cannot fathom chose to promote OrCAD after they acquired it instead of the better software. Here's a specific example in the interface. If you wanted to draw a wire, the keyboard shortcut of the old software was 'w' but orcad required you to type 'ctrl + w'. Why are you forcing me to use control when w doesn't do anything on its own? It was filled with similar tiny annoyances that just slowed things down. (Admittedly, it's been years since that was my primary work, and free stuff is good enough for what I do now.) I sincerely hope that orcad has continued to improve over the years.
- antimony51 8mo agoI could not sign up, because "email rate limit exceeded" but i was wondering if it had a feature to probe the voltage at a certain node.
- paulgb 8mo agoI remember following this at the time! FYI it was "shut down" (kept online but no further development) two years ago (https://x.com/KennethCassel/status/1620500575183073280 https://x.com/KennethCassel/status/1620500575183073280) > Decided to shutdown Diode. (For now the site is live, I'll likely open-source the code in case anyone wants to take the baton and run) Kenneth is now working on RMFG (https://www.rmfg.com/ https://www.rmfg.com/)
- throwaway290 8mo agoBlack screen with "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)."
- samuelbeek 8mo agoI'm working on a similar project, it's called schematik.io and you can use it to generate hardware projects (schematics, components lists, code, everything). Love the 3d viewer they've done here.
- ge96 8mo agoDamn the 3D graphics look great This would be useful for opensource hardware projects (aimed at beginners) to literally see how things are wired together. I'm still not at the schematic phase myself. But I use MS Paint wiring diagrams. OMG the wires flex, damn
- MeteorMarc 8mo agoGive KiCad a try for drawing schematics. It is FOSS.
- ge96 8mo agoYeah that is still on my list to learn eg. designing my own circuit board. My stuff is still basic eg. wiring together an Arduino/RPi to break out sensor boards.
- rounce 8mo agoFalstad CircuitJS[0] is excellent and far better than the mess of a breadboard IMHO. It also allows easily instrumenting the circuits at multiple points so you can get a sense of the changes in ‘realtime’ without having to get (and learn to use) an oscilloscope (yet). 0: https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html
- ge96 8mo agoI was referring to the visual aspect eg. this is literally a 3D capacitor vs. -|(- which may be harder for casual electronic hobbyists. Less for theory more visually "this wire goes here"
- rounce 7mo agoBreadboards, whilst initially appearing to be nice and accessible, tend to be a false economy when it comes to building a good intuition around a lot of fundamentals. This is because it’s a lot easier to reason about the basics with ‘perfect’ circuit and component behaviour than the messiness of reality. For example in a ‘perfect’ circuit wires can have no resistance or inductance (unless you want them to), in reality it’s unavoidable that they do, by how much will vary for reasons that may not be obvious to a beginner. I’m not saying breadboards are universally bad, they have a place but IMHO learning fundamentals directly through them ain’t it. I spent a long time stubbornly trying to learn things breadboard-first and in hindsight it was horrendously confusing versus drawing schematics, doing the math, and then playing in something like Circuit JS. It was only then that really important things started to really become second nature. There’s also the other thing of being able to read documentation. If one wants to use some module in one’s project, the datasheet and application notes aren’t going to have breadboard-centric illustrations, they’re going to have schematics (or at least abstracted ones). I presume you come from a programming background, and so would know the importance of being able to read documentation, and knowing that if you can’t do that you’re pretty much dead in the water. The hard part of learning about electronics is not identifying the components but getting a good understanding of what is happening in the circuit. For that, it’s better to have a learning tool which displays voltage and current at every part of the circuit all the time. Rather than something which prioritises looking like what you’d have on your desk as a constraint for its method of visual representation.
- luispa 8mo agothis is dope
- agcat 8mo agoThis is so damn cool. I remember 10-12 years ago i used to teach kids to do these things manually. This is a great product for kids to experiment and then run it real life on their kits.
- lasgawe 8mo agoYears ago, around 10-12 years back, our Windows XP PC had software similar to this. Dont remember the name. I used to spend hours experimenting with it. haha Nostalgia.
- dirtytoken7 8mo ago[flagged]
- hulitu 8mo ago> the barrier to hardware design is specification not implementation now Whatever you are smoking, it must be really strong. Can I have some ? the barrier to hardware design is crappy datasheets from the supplier.
- tamimio 8mo agoI want an AI that I throw the simulation and it design the PCB and all verification.
- hulitu 8mo agoROTFL.
- umairnadeem123 8mo ago[dead]
- Groxx 8mo ago- click simulate in the default "push button to turn on LED" demo - clock advances - voltage around the LED slowly rises to infinity for some reason er.
- 110100000 8mo agoDoes this work: FTPS protocol relaying to SSL, invoking methods of secure crawler data channel.