CircuitLab (YC W13) Has 70K Users/Month For Its Electronics Design Tool

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/18/yc-backed-circuitlab-has-70k-monthly-users-for-its-browser-based-electronics-design-and-simulation-tool/

by amerf1 • 13 years ago

87 21 13 years ago

techcrunch.com

savrajsingh• 13 years ago

Are you guys working with Upverter on potential ways to collaborate? Just wondering. Looks like an awesome project! Good luck!

compumike8• 13 years ago

Thanks! We've met their team, and they're a great group.

zoul• 13 years ago

The first thing that came into my mind as I saw the demonstration video was Bret Victor’s instant feedback theme (http://vimeo.com/36579366). It would be so cool to change the component parameters interactively and see the changes in the simulated graphs.

Having an “unsaved changes” warning in a web app feels weird since we have Google Docs.

compumike8• 13 years ago

Thanks for all the feedback. We've seen the video and our client-side simulation engine lets us think about building something like that in a future version!

It turns out that many users are using CircuitLab to do a quick test or a quick change (i.e. what if 0.1uF becomes 0.22uF), and unlike a conventional text document, it isn't 100% obvious that the newest version is always the one they want to persist. (Imagine if git/hg auto-committed your code every time you typed a character!) In some scenarios it's actually more like interacting with a REPL. This is definitely a UX area we'll look to get right going forward!

ollysb• 13 years ago

Maybe a photoshop style history would work well here?

kaib• 13 years ago

There are two separate user desires that you need to separate:

1. If [browser/server/electric utility/network] crashes I should not lose work.

2. I want to explore a few quick changes and then revert back to a known good point.

The technical solution is to do continuous saving but let the user mark certain spots in the revision tree as more important. Please note that you will be storing all revisions and the structure will most definitely be a tree (due to undo/redo/forking whatnot) Marking could be as easy as hitting save or creating a named revision.

From an UX standpoint continuous saves are best effort while explicitly hitting save should freeze the system and only return an OK once the data has really been persisted to disk.

My $.2, I've worked on Google Docs and Tinkercad.. :-)

mercuryrising• 13 years ago

This looks pretty similar to when I tried it a few months ago. I used it once, and never used it again (not saying because it's bad or anything, but I like my tried and true Eagle to do circuit board layout, and I generally don't do analog so I don't really need simulation).

I think some things are really nice, but some things are obviously lacking.

It's very easy to use. This is great, it's not intimidating (at least for me). I'd like to see copy pasting elements not paste them directly over the other element, and I'd like it to paste it into 'my hand' where I can move it somewhere else right away.

Add some color. Try it. This interface is very, very bland. What is there, three colors on the screen? If you're shooting for beginners, adding colors will make a world of a difference. Color the wires. Things connected to V+ are red, things to GND are black. Signals (wires connected to transistors, etc) are yellow, or whatever. Let me pick the color of LEDs (start them blue or something). Let me tell you what color wires I have on hand, and you make the 'best' decision (or most standard) for laying my circuit out. Colors are one of the best way of rapidly signalling information, use it to your advantage.

Automatically connect close components. Say I have 1-2 grid steps in between components, just connect them for me. I wish I could tell you how many times I've hooked a transistor up to a resistor up to an LED in a schematic program. Save some time and just connect it. Luckily, signals generally go left to right, and power goes up and down. This could work nicely.

I really, really like how I can hop on and try it right away without signing up for anything. I'll never try Upverter (someone else mentioned it) because I have to sign up before I can even use the damn thing. Maybe it's awesome, maybe it's not, I'll never know. I do know about your product though - and the next time you make changes I'll know I can try it out without being hassled. Fantastic decision.

I'm not sure who exactly you guys are targeting - but if you'd like to include beginners, it would be a nice touch to be able to double click components (this operation currently just selects and deselects a component) and get a 'summary' of what the part does. Have a real world picture of them, or embed a wikipedia page, or open a new tab to the wikipedia page, something to more strongly couple the learning aspects to the simulation.

It would be nice if I could open up a series of schematics, and poke around with them. The simulation feature is your best learning tool, but if I can't design something yet, I can't really simulate anything. Giving me something like an LED connected to a switch, an 555 LED flasher, and an LED connected to a PWM controlled off a pot. Or something. Bonus points if you set up these basic circuits, and record videos of them at all the stages (for all input values), letting users see what they're doing (granted you could just compile a video from frames that you have from running a sweep with the circuit).

compumike8• 13 years ago

Thanks for the great feedback. We definitely appreciate how enormous the problem is and that we're just at the beginning! (Without giving away too much, we're already working on some of the things you mentioned.)

clicks• 13 years ago

I think I remember seeing this quite a while back... and having a very positive reaction. It's obviously much more intuitive than Multisim (and much more prettier-looking, much more 'accessible'), but it's obviously not as powerful as Multisim (at least as of yet). So, as far as I see, it is a match made in heaven for high-school level 'intro to circuits' classes. I wish you guys the best, you've made a fabulous webapp. :)

compumike8• 13 years ago

Thanks! Most of the ex-Multisim "converts" we've talked to are actually at the university level. But yes, very happy to make it more accessible to younger students as well. I certainly started playing with electronics as a teen and I suspect that's true for many here on HN.

brianfryer• 13 years ago

Woooo hoo! Congratulations Mike & Humberto!

compumike8• 13 years ago

Thanks Brian!

VLM• 13 years ago

You might be aiming at users who are too entry level for this idea, but given higher level users, you have an obvious monetization path of "export to a Digikey / Jameco / Mouser / "localized" shopping list.". If its already there I didn't see it. Not just dump a list, but the specific part numbers at those distributors. Heck, export and make an a printed circuit board while you're at it...

Going the other direction for monetization somebody should make a startup for all those kit mfgrs so Ramsey and all the QRP ham radio guys etc etc can automatically have their kits online ready to mess with and modify. Like your connection to stack exchange but somewhat higher level. Or magazines and their article projects. QST/QEX and other hobbiest mags.

A third direction might be with the mfgrs. Rather than a semi-generic IRF530 fet you could get Vishay or ON or International or the usual suspects to have their "specific" '530 device. Even if the difference between mfgrs is mostly just rounding errors...

cadr• 13 years ago

A thousand times this. The few times I've gone about building hobby circuits post-college, the most annoying part is buying the parts.

compumike8• 13 years ago

Great to hear more confirmation from you both that this is a serious pain point! (Not just for hobbyists, either.)

droz• 13 years ago

I've been using the product off and on for the past few months and overall have had a very positive experience. However, I think it would benefit from a more mature range of simulation capabilities and component inventory.

It would be great if the product incorporated the real-time parameter variations you get from the falstad simulator [1] in order to get a better intuition for what's going on. It would also help if the simulation computation time was greatly reduced.

It's an annoyance to have to drop a generic component (e.g., NPN transistor) and not see my part of choice in the options and have to manually go dig through my papers and find the datasheet and look up the parameters. It just distracts from what I'm try to do- save myself time.

Overall, I think that the product needs to target the non-professional segment that has long surpassed beginner status. Essentially, experienced hobbyists that are looking for an online alternative to the more expensive professional solutions. For beginners, they can use the Mattel styled product Fritzing [2] on the desktop to mock out breadboards and circuit diagrams.

[1] http://www.falstad.com/circuit/

[2] http://www.fritzing.org/

compumike8• 13 years ago

Thanks! Deep component library and expanded simulation capabilities are our top requests and are definitely where we're going next.

iansinke• 13 years ago

Being in my second year of Electrical (and Biomedical) Engineering at McMaster University, I have to say I love CircuitLab.

My advice would be: Buy all the EE textbooks (they're expensive, I know...) and make sure that all the problems in the textbooks can be done with CircuitLab. Make it really easy for PSPICE instructions to be converted to CircuitLab. The education market is a huge one for you and I think you can really win out over PSPICE/MultiSim here.

You've already done a great job with PSPICE compatibility in terms of terminology. And I love how easy it is to modify MOSFET/BJT models. I'd prefer a bit more customization of the simulation plots, though.

zalzane• 13 years ago

I've recently been using a bit of circuitlab for throwing together diagrams for lab reports. I've found it to be much faster and much less of a hassle than using pspice.

I've had very few issues using it over the past few months, but since the founders are probably eyeballing this thread I'll lay out some of my suggestions here.

-If I try to export an unsaved circuit, I get a prompt pestering me to save my circuit before exporting it. This happens nearly every time for me since almost all of my circuits are quick no-nonsense stuff that I spend 30 seconds on. I suggest that when I try to export an unsaved circuit, it gets automatically saved to my folder as _exportedCircuit[0/1/2/3/..]. At the very least make the export button bring up the save prompt if I press it with an unsaved circuit.

-The components are a bit of a hassle to navigate. To reach any one component, I have to do loads of scrolling through that menu on the side. Often I'm looking for a component, get halfway to the bottom, and wonder if I had missed it. It would probably be better to implement the component box with the components of each category nested under a category button.

-Virtually all of my exported circuits are going into a word document. The first time I did an export I had to measure how wide my word document was in pixels so I could get a full resolution image on it without going over the pagelimits. I suggest implementing an alternate export size field for exporting the image in terms of width/height in inches of a standard word document.

CircuitLab (YC W13) Has 70K Users/Month For Its Electronics Design Tool

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