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

https://www.withdiode.com/projects/62716731-5e1e-4622-86af-90d8e6b5123b

by malerba118 • 4 years ago

905 259 4 years ago

withdiode.com

melony2• 4 years ago

Are you using SPICE for the actual simulation?

CoffeePython9• 4 years ago

Hey! I work on Diode w/ Austin (OP). Yeah we use a wasm-compiled version of ngSpice for the circuit simulation.

etimberg• 4 years ago

Cool! We did something similar when I was on the team that built multisim.com

marmetio• 4 years 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/

kragen10• 4 years 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

IshKebab• 4 years 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

Unfortunately it's not the most popular project.

malerba11812• 4 years 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

duskwuff3• 4 years 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.

bitwize2• 4 years ago

That is literally one of the first things you learn as a beginner.

kragen10• 4 years ago

maybe you should spend your time writing software that teaches the beginners how to read schematics, thus enabling them to make progress toward their presumed goal of understanding and designing circuits, instead of giving them additional handicaps to overcome, such as having to use a user interface that is as confusing as a breadboard (if not more so, if the comments indicating that the pin-1 indicators are missing from the simulated chips are correct; in my browser the app wouldn't even load)

or at least software that gives you an error message when it fails instead of a blank white page

jcparkyn• 4 years ago

If you haven't tried micro-cap, I'd recommend checking it out. It became free a few years ago when the company liquidated, and it's orders of magnitude more powerful than LTspice (and quite a bit more intuitive, but still not great). Don't expect any updates though.

pugworthy• 4 years ago

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

musicale2• 4 years ago

Is that you Scott Forstall?

mtreis86• 4 years ago

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

gumboza3• 4 years 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

kragen10• 4 years ago

also if your oscillator's q is high it can take a terribly long time in simulation to start oscillating

malerba11812• 4 years ago

Not currently, but useful feedback for us!

proee• 4 years 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_862• 4 years ago

I believe another web-based tool which can do this already is 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• 4 years 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 :)

CoffeePython9• 4 years ago

Yeah we'll likely create a schematic view! Thanks

Kwpolska3• 4 years 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).

Taniwha2• 4 years ago

doesn't seem to work on chrome either

CoffeePython9• 4 years 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.

jakear• 4 years 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.

CoffeePython9• 4 years 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)

macintux• 4 years ago

macOS Safari (2020 Intel MacBook Pro) is unusably slow.

malerba11812• 4 years ago

3d opens up a few extra possibilities for us, but i think there's definitely advantages to 2d as well and seeing every solder joint on the arduino board is just a waste of cpu/memory at the moment. We have some camera presets that let you position the camera directly overhead for a top-down view which effectively is a 2d building experience. We might create a dedicated 2d view if there's enough demand for it!

Kwpolska3• 4 years ago

The overhead view might not be enough. Performance issues aside, if I take your sample and rotate the camera to the overhead view, the wires that power the Arduino overlap in a kinda confusing way. It’s even worse if you swap them around, with the wire colors randomly mixing in the middle (but it is also broken when looking at it from the side). A 2D-first design wouldn’t need to worry about it, but it would instead route the wires in a way that avoids overlapping wherever possible (and two parallel wires would be quite trivial).

duskwuff3• 4 years ago

So many times this. There is a reason why engineers use schematics instead of assembly diagrams or renderings when designing circuits or discussing how they operate. In particular, layouts on solderless breadboards tend to become incomprehensible for any sort of even mildly complex circuit.

p1necone• 4 years ago

layouts on solderless breadboards tend to become incomprehensible for any sort of even mildly complex circuit.

Translating non breadboard circuit schematics to a breadboard is definitely something some people struggle with, It would be useful to have a tool that could do that for you.

MichaelZuo• 4 years ago

The title does seem like a misaimed comparison.

cpcallen• 4 years ago

Also doesn't seem to work in Chrome: I see a toolbar and the rest of the page is blank.

CoffeePython9• 4 years ago

looks like we got the HN hug of death lol, back up now

Gigachad• 4 years ago

Does the page just show up mostly blank for anyone else?

bob29• 4 years ago

Yes

sixothree• 4 years ago

Why is it even a web site? Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but this seems slow and unusable. But more importantly, I have a hard time bringing myself to trust anything that isn't saved locally.

edit: Also I feel terrible that my negative comment has any weight in this thread. I don't want to be a detractor. It's just that this is not for me.

People work hard to make things and you can't please everybody. You definitely can't please curmudgeons like me sometimes.

malerba11812• 4 years ago

Yeah, so we started diode 3 months ago and in the beginning here we're focused mostly on making electronics more accessible to youth/beginners.

One major advantage of web based tools is shareability and we hope to see content creators writing articles with embedded diode projects so that tutorials can include inline interactive examples.

This is already common in the software world with tools like codesandbox and stackblitz, but not so much in the hardware world. Hardware tutorials often include fritzing diagrams, but we think the next step is interactive simulations anywhere and everywhere.

ryandrake• 4 years ago

Yea, the whole "looks old = bad" meme rears its head again. Some of the most usable web sites in existence like Craigslist and McMaster-Carr look "old" but they do what you need them to do and do it cross-platform/cross-browser.

danuker• 4 years ago

I would add Hacker News itself as a great example.

yazzku• 4 years ago

Well, it is like 2003 as far as the real-time performance of the graphics go. Or maybe more like 1993.

ilyt• 4 years ago

If you have ever used LTSpice you'd know, the "old" looking layout is not really a problem but the arcane way anything is done, different from every app I ever used.

chongli• 4 years ago

I just started using LTSpice a few days ago. It's pretty arcane for sure but at least it's consistent. The tool is really not that complicated at all. Its value seems to be in its simulation capabilities as well as its selection of standard components. It does crash here and there, though, but I haven't lost any work yet.

wtfmcgrill• 4 years ago

I jump from altium to kicad to solidworks multiple times a day but the most annoying jump is when I go to ltspice and go, why is move bound to F7. I stopped even bothering to try to use hotkeys on LTspice.

jay3ss• 4 years ago

LTSpice is pretty great. I used it in undergrad to design and simulate a single block of CMOS memory. It was a little tough getting going, but once I figured things out it was a great experience.

pjmlp• 4 years ago

To show my age, during digital circuit design classes I used something similar but targeted to Windows 3.x.

It was much better than the simulator shown on this thread.

salmo• 4 years ago

The tools with origins >2003 are pretty useless beyond making things out of prefab parts. That’s cool for beginner stuff, but I feel like we’re dropping people off a cliff from there. Most are really just sales platforms for parts or PCBs.

My workflow is a complicated combination of LTSpice, KiCAD, prototyping from the schematic and then ordering PCBs. It’s a little painful, but the tools are fast to use. I wish KiCAD’s SPICE integration was as natural as LTSpice and I could maintain 1 library of parts.

Breadboards are getting too painful for me to use. Too much time dealing with bad connections or noise from jumper wires being little antennas. It’s more of an issue with audio circuits than digital.

I guess my dream is if you could easily get a symbol, footprint, SPICE model, and 3D model of parts from vendors that all dropped into 1 toolchain.

Maybe a commercial offering is more like that. I’ve never really looked.

HelloNurse• 4 years ago

The demo lets me choose "PNP transistor" or "NPN transistor", and that's it for transistors.

ur-whale4• 4 years ago

If LTSpice :

   1. was OpenSource

   2. would *please* switch to modern conventions for Load/Save/Cut/Paste/Undo/Redo/Exit keyboard shortcuts

   3. would have a larger, *online*, library of standard parts instead of having to download every missing ones every time from random obscure places on the internet

   4. had a setting for switching off showing the names of *all* the new components on the circuit

   5. had a vaguely sane way to keep all the .asy and .sym files used by a .asc in the same directory

   6. had a central repo of example circuits / standard circuits

   7. had an API to its spice engine

It'd be the perfect tool.

But in the meantime, and in spite of its old age, it's still light-years ahead of the web-based thing from 2022

dheera• 4 years ago

Agreed. I can't figure out for the life of me how to move this LED upward in the Z direction. Or bend the pins so I can plug the LED into 2 different Arduino pins e.g. GND and A0. I have the same problem with most 3D software, I have a 2D mouse and it's a fundamentally inadequate human interface device to manipulate things in 3 dimensions.

https://imgur.com/wF5voVO

I think a modern 2D UI (i.e. with nice looking fonts, swipe gestures, hamburger icons, generous margins and space) would be nice.

nabilhat• 4 years ago

One reason is a noncritical third-party dependency; the circuit canvas will patiently wait in line to load forever until fonts.gstatic successfully loads. Normally I wouldn't post that kind of feedback here, but there's no readily apparent way to submit feedback or bug reports at the site so here we are.

CoffeePython9• 4 years ago

thanks for the feedback!

ironically maybe it's also feedback that our share feedback button is too hidden

Fordec• 4 years ago

And on the good software the 2D interfaces take customizable color parameters, any level detail you like 3D files, customizable fonts.

Just take 20 minutes to customize a settings file and reuse for every new project after, iterating as you go and you'll get yourself pretty realistic outputs long term.

fuzzythinker• 4 years ago

On Chrome on 2019 MBP, nothing loads until 5secs later. Zooming lags 2+ secs. Probably only good for making a presentation on a beefy machine, not useable otherwise.

oscillonoscope• 4 years 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

jonathankoren• 4 years ago

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

pkstn• 4 years ago

Wow, so awesome!

gumboza3• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

LTspice still works great afaik. I use it on Linux with Wine.

rahen• 4 years ago

Have a look at Qucs-S for a native, usable Spice on Linux: 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.

antegamisou2• 4 years ago

I want 2003. That's the last time anything worked.

This. NI Multisim is one of my [proprietary] favorites too.

teleforce• 4 years 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• 4 years 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!

gumboza3• 4 years 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.

a9h74j• 4 years ago

Considering how many ECAD programs have come and gone since the beginnings, over time that could still be a net win.

"When you include the time to earn the money for a car, driving can be no faster than walking." (~Mumford)

puzzlingcaptcha• 4 years ago

Logism evolution works great and is quite modern.

https://github.com/logisim-evolution/logisim-evolution

SAI_Peregrinus• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

AceJohnny2• 4 years ago

because why do we need 3D?

Teaching is much easier when the students can connect the abstract representation to something they can experience.

stephen_g• 4 years ago

I’m not sure how valuable it would be in this case, but 3D visualisation of PCBs is extensively used in pro circuit board design. It’s very easy to place something in 2D and not realise that something will totally clash with it. Even when you have the components all set up with heights and clearance rules, it can be things like connectors where you have something blocking it so the connector is technically clear (so passes DRC) but you can’t actually plug it in because you have a big component in the way! The next level is then importing enclosures and things to make sure things fit and can actually be assembled.

It’s interesting too that there are all sorts of mistakes that become a bit more obvious when you look at it in 3D than in the 2D view.

nomel• 4 years ago

Maybe a checkbox to "show parasitic components".

kurthr• 4 years ago

Exactly! Allow idealized networks, but also insert reasonably sized/modeled parasitics to be inserted so you can see why your beautiful plan isn't really.

That's not just capacitances! At speed the resistance of a long trace or the inductance to a neighbor are big deals. Meanwhile the internal PCB planes of Power/Gnd are necessary low impedance bypass that no packaged cap could provide.

analog314• 4 years ago

This is a tangent, but having worked with digital circuits for 40 years, the improvements in chips have made circuit construction -- even breadboarding -- vastly more forgiving than ever before. I've run 10 MHz clocks on breadboards and 100 MHz SPI bus on 2 layer boards that were not designed with extreme care. And, it's a fast precision ADC that's meeting its datasheet specs on that board.

No doubt the parasitics and other nasties still come into play, but it's still amazing how much faster we can go before they start to bite.

akiselev• 4 years ago

It also helps a lot when you get a well made breadboard from BusBoard [1] instead of the Aliexpress special.

[1] https://www.busboard.com/

Teknoman1173• 4 years ago

That's been a funny thing for me. I'm not an electrical engineer, at all. My electrical knowledge is an introductory electromagnetics course I had to take in college that I've mostly forgotten, reading/watching EEVblog, other internet sources, playing around with cheap and/or old parts, reading whatever I can find, etc.

I've made some retrocomputing boards (<= 50 MHz) (8051, 286, 68010, 68030, etc.) and haven't had much of a problem. No idea what the EMI looks like though. Greatest goof I had so far was an old part who's datasheet didn't mention that the signal output was open collector so I had to bodge a resistor in. Mostly just followed advice I found on the internet -> 4 layer boards can be had for very cheap these days (JLCPCB does 10 for $30 w/ ENIG boards up to 10cm x 10cm), so I followed the "just do yourself a favor and get the 4 layers boards so you can make ground and power planes" advice. Used a tool to compute minimum trace spacing to stay under a certain capacitance for a specific copper weight, board thickness, dielectric type, etc.

Probably my crowning achievement at this point is making an 1.8V LVDS to TMDS level shifter board so I can get HDMI 1.2a (4x 1.65 Gbps lanes + sidebands) out of an FPGA board I repurposed from some cryptomining hardware I bought on eBay. Had to learn how to do soldering using a stencil, paste, hot air station, and a hotplate because no one is hand soldering 0.4mm QFN packages. 0402 are the smallest thing I can do by hand.

Next thing I want to try is breaking out a small BGA. Managed to get a few Lattice iCE40HX8K's in the CT256 package (256 balls @ 0.8mm pitch BGA).

What hurts is how patent/royalty/industry interest group encumbered that nearly everything modern is. Want to do PCIe? Join PCIe SIG. Want to do USB? Join USB-IF. Want to support SD cards? Pay a bunch to SDA. Actually their patents expired so maybe you can do native SD mode now without much fear. HDMI is awful, DisplayPort requires you to join VESA, MIPI for CSI and DSI devices, etc.

alar442• 4 years ago

I've been doing multi chip stuff with 16MHz Atmels with no issues just using a de-coupleing cap on the Vins. Did it not used to be that easy?

auxym2• 4 years ago

Listening to various Rick Hartley talks on youtube, I got the understanding that it was the opposite: even at slow clock rates, modern ICs cause all sorts of signal integrity and EMI issues because of very fast edge rise times.

Cannot confirm from my experience though, I don't practice EE, I just dabbble in electronics and never actually characterized SI and EMI in my creations.

thewileyone• 4 years ago

"parasitic capacitance" ... I shudder recalling the nights wasted in the analog lab due to this.

xxs• 4 years ago

Breadboards are for prototyping small low-speed circuits.

Reminds me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR9TweWf3w8 Sine oscillator (no ICs), 10K load, 24+GHz on a breadboard.

robotguy• 4 years ago

Schematics HAVE TO define which components are in the circuit and how they are connected (unless you really want to write net lists).

Schematics SHOULD help readers to understand what a circuit does.

Especially in, let's say, "prosumer" boards (like boards designed by small companies for hobbyists) I keep seeing schematics that are designed to make it easy for the dev to get them done and NOT to communicate the circuit theory.

It's exactly like writing code without any formatting or comments. As far as I'm concerned connecting components by net name is as bad or worse than a GOTO.

\rant

heywherelogingo• 4 years ago

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

CoffeePython9• 4 years ago

looks like our db went down for a few minutes when you were trying it out! Sorry about that!

malerba11812• 4 years ago

this combines spice simulations with microcontroller simulations

kragen10• 4 years ago

for me it combines a blank white page with no error message with some buttons at the top that don't do anything

blacklion2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

bitwize2• 4 years ago

16 colors at 640x480 resolution! VGA graphics are the future!

antegamisou2• 4 years ago

Also check out TARGET 3001! for a 3D view mode

https://ibfriedrich.com/en/index.html

onirom• 4 years ago

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

mdswanson• 4 years ago

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

godelski2• 4 years 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.

CoffeePython9• 4 years 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!

godelski2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

CoffeePython9• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

Kiboneu2• 4 years 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/

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• 4 years 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.

kragen10• 4 years ago

the simulation blows up sometimes

it doesn't look ancient to me

IIAOPSW2• 4 years 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?

alphabetter2• 4 years 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.

gnramires3• 4 years ago

There's a similar product at https://wokwi.com/ (with an open source core)

It's actually really useful, fast, educational. Highly recommended.

I also wish someone would revitalize falstad circuit sim (http://falstad.com/circuit/), which is still I think the best tool for experimentation with analog electronics. Just a little bit better interface and user friendliness and it would be amazing!

A somewhat more robust numerical backend (that can give error guarantees) would also be nice, you kind of have to tinker with time steps in some cases.

malerba11812• 4 years 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.

gnramires3• 4 years 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)

alphabetter2• 4 years 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.

gnramires3• 4 years ago

Well, first, thanks so much for your work it's really one of the most useful tools on the internet imo. I'm not super qualified to critique it, specially the interface. (but I think it works well as is!)

I had a look back at it and see many great new features.

(1) I think it's awesome that you can program javascript inputs (and there's AVR8js). But it's not really user friendly: maybe there could be some editor window or something you could program js in with syntax highlighting

I think that's what would be most significant contribution for me, because there are quite a few prototypes where you want to mix analog/digital and that's currently difficult.

(2) If you want to get really fancy, look at editor.p5.js interface (although in terms of self-documentation[1], I think circuitjs is better!). The cloud save functionality could be really useful (although I'd understand if you find it out of scope).

(3) Maybe the time step could adjust automatically as an option? (Something like: auto step -- simulate at half speed and check the difference between the two simulations; if significant, improve accuracy until it reaches maximum; I'm sure there could be better approaches though like trying to find maximum resonance frequencies)

(4) An easy way to run it offline? I think since it's already a web app and it's very light, an electron app distribution would be nice (although HN notoriously cringes at electron :P ).

[1] I define self-documentation as the ability to find functionality and documentation within a user interface. That's easier done with GUIs where commands and references should be a few clicks away, though it can also be done in text interfaces with help commands and such.

app4soft2• 4 years ago

Recent and related:

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

pifm_guy• 4 years ago

A similar project:

CircuitJS: https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html

I couldn't compare to OP because it timed out loading on my slow internet.

avsteele• 4 years ago

This seems pretty cool, esp for a newbie to know how to put down a circuit.

I use 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.

franky47• 4 years ago

For a more schematic + signal analysis, less breadboard IRL approach, EveryCircuit is just as good looking.

https://everycircuit.com/

justaj• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Lightweight UIs sound pretty 2003. Can't have that.

sgt• 4 years ago

Looks great, but yes, this is pretty unusable due to the high CPU usage. Also on Chromium.

beambot• 4 years ago

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

dismalpedigree• 4 years ago

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

aifer4• 4 years 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.

kragen10• 4 years 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

musicale2• 4 years ago

Still trying to solve that Y10K problem I see.

kragen10• 4 years ago

it's slow going, but fortunately we still have a significant amount of time left

midoridensha• 4 years ago

Why are all your year values starting with 0? They should be 1. This is the year 12022 FYI.

kragen10• 4 years ago

one departure from arbitrary conventions is usually too much for the lumpencommentariat, frequently sending them into incomprehensible rages

with two, as per your suggestion, we might never see any followup comments that are actually about how to make a better circuit simulator

so far we're at zero for two

panzi• 4 years 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.

quickthrower22• 4 years ago

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

defactoPun3• 4 years ago

Only thing I miss now is that burnt LED smell xD

quickthrower22• 4 years ago

Worth the day it will take off your life expectancy!

anothernewdude• 4 years ago

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

scott_h2• 4 years ago

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

scott_h2• 4 years ago

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

rickreynoldssf• 4 years ago

This does nothing but spike my CPU. :(

ralusek• 4 years ago

Pretty awesome, thanks for building this.

blobbers• 4 years ago

Yay b2logic!

oillio• 4 years ago

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

jesselawson• 4 years 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• 4 years 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/

vonnegut• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

I just prototyped a circuit using this: 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Super cool.

whywhywouldyou• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

MexicanJoe• 4 years ago

I wish I understood electronics

jpoesen• 4 years ago

You're in luck, friend. On the interweb you can learn anything, free of charge.

Case in point: https://www.tinkercad.com/circuits

ur-whale4• 4 years ago

Here is a really nice resource to get started:

https://www.youtube.com/@simplyput2796/videos

dingi• 4 years ago

Is this app even working? It crashes every time.

donatj• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

I agree with you but the website didn't ask me to sign in to use the app

malerba11812• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

skykooler• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Perhaps peripheral (the original site has been hugged to death).

Both clashlang: https://clash-lang.org/

And 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• 4 years ago

Unusable on Macbook 2015. Completely freezes my system.

MaxikCZ• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Great find!

pkolaczk• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

On my laptop, chrome went down entirely as it was using 100% of the RAM, had to kill -9 it

londons_explore• 4 years 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.

Kwpolska3• 4 years 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).

defactoPun3• 4 years ago

but i guess that's the point, you have to have the breadboard and components first. If in a stitch, maybe this would do for that moment.

duke360• 4 years ago

WHAAAATT??

atoav• 4 years 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• 4 years 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....

lbriner• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

kreelman• 4 years 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.

blacklion2• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

RektBoy2• 4 years 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

RektBoy2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

incrudible• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

I actually made a circuit simulator for boolean operations in 2003

ur-whale4• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

defactoPun3• 4 years ago

You have my respect sir !

JCM9• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

malerba11812• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

That's like saying "we're making it less performant and more fragile on purpose"

blululu3• 4 years ago

The simulator under the hood is cool - someone even got a component to smoke. But the post leads with a pretty condescending title that focuses on aesthetic motivations by dumping (superficially) on everything else. Naturally people are going to focus on the usability of the interface and unfortunately it is really hard to use. Gratuitous 3D is not a good design choice for a number of reasons that others have elaborated in great detail.

jmole• 4 years ago

This is a bad take - most UIs from that era are objectively worse, and most of the good ones have been carried forwards and incorporated into newer versions.

With old software, you have a lot of experimental ideas that make it into prod. Want properties on this item? Sorry, right click rotates the component. Click the component and press P instead.

Today, at least in the professional software world, UIs are better than they’ve ever been and the programs are capable of infinitely more. And in 20 years we’ll be looking back on this era the same way: “What do you mean you can’t see an AR preview of this component you’re working on?“ “You had to label each wire of the I3C bus by hand??”

dpacmittal• 4 years ago

I don't know, i still prefer Win XP/7 UI over Win 10/11

al2o3cr• 4 years 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

ThaFresh2• 4 years ago

incredible

ThaFresh2• 4 years ago

incredible, Ive often wondered why they were all so shit

inglor• 4 years ago

Wokwi does this pretty well

AcerbicZero• 4 years ago

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

hw-guy• 4 years ago

This one looks like it was made for children.

Archit3ch• 4 years 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.

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

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