Circuit simulator and schematic capture tool | Hacker News Reader

Circuit simulator and schematic capture tool

everycircuit.com

247 pointsntrischi58 comments

If you like everycircuit you should also try this circuit sim in the browser. It is really cool - especially for learning/teaching: http://lushprojects.com/circuitjs/

It was originally developed as a Java applet by Paul Falstad. As Java in the browser got more and more troublesome I modified it to work with HTML 5 for a plug-in free experience. We agreed to release the new version as GPL: https://github.com/sharpie7/circuitjs1/network

Very nice looking. Can't wait to give it a go. Was it difficult to port from java to javascript?

It is still in Java. I did the port using Google Web Toolkit which compiles Java to Javascript. The main work was to rework libraries available in native Java but not in GWT and to change to match a GWT event model.

This is great, amazing work! I used the Falstad simulator at university when PSpice wasn't giving me nice results...

Thanks for your work on this, and for releasing it open source! I used to run Paul's app locally for peace of mind; now I self-host an instance of your version. Encoding the simulation in the URL is brilliant for sharing and teaching.

I really like proteus from labcenter electronics. It isn't as pretty as this tool (by a million miles), but it can actually simulate microcontrollers and even full-fledged ARM processors.

You can construct an arduino, as in drag it together in an editor similar to this one, run the USB port emulator on your local machine and run the arduino IDE against your simulated circuit, and program stuff to control servos or relays.

They've got such drivers for USB, serial, parallel (if you install a version of windows ancient enough to support parallel ports) and ethernet if memory serves. No wifi though.

I loved developing like that.

Proteus can be very expensive if you want to go legitimate though. A single VSM license is upwards of $200. In most cases it's cheaper for a hobbyist to just buy the components and test out the circuit than to run the simulation.

That being said... it's super useful tool. I used a bootleg version of Proteus during undergrad. Coming from a third-world country where electronics labs are often severely under-equipped... it went a long way towards helping me understand the material I was covering.

> A single VSM license is upwards of $200

That's actually regarded as "dirt cheap" in the world of circuit simulators.

said hobbyist also needs to buy an oscilloscope though. Granted they'll likely need that down the road, but still...

Proteus may be nice as a "babby's first electronic" program, but as an actual EDA capture tool it's a fucking disaster (we use it at work, I wish we didn't).

If you want to make a LED blink, buy a actual arduino. If you want to simulate actual analog electronics, bite the bullet and learn SPICE. If you want to actually layout circuit boards, buy ANYTHING else.

Basically, as soon as you have an actual, complex board, the DRC system shits itself, and you wind up having to manually, visually check your layout before manufacturing, rather then letting the software that's supposed to do it do the checking.

Shoutout to the open source KiCad EDA project.

Do you know another program that can emulate microcontrollers and preferably also other chips together with actual electrical components in a circuit and make them programmable and simulatable without actual real components ?

brief note: LTSpice is free and graphical. The learning curve is shorter than pure Spice.

https://circuits.io/ from Autodesk also has an Arduino. It works inside a browser. Nifty learning tool!

It's great to see all the new approaches in this field. IMHO animated interactive visualization of the current flow is pretty to look at, but beyond a certain early point in one's understanding of voltage & current relationships, it's not necessarily more useful than not being there at all (and having non-interactive access only).

For a CS analogy: when you're trying to teach how and why to balance a binary search tree, it's useful to visually draw out the trees of the first few example steps. However, after you understand the concepts and the invariants, it would be rather unhelpful (or even distracting) to have an animated drawing of the tree as the algorithm progresses every time you were working with a BST!

Disclosure -- I wrote CircuitLab https://www.circuitlab.com/ -- another browser-based circuit simulator and schematic capture tool which doesn't do animated graphs, but instead includes:

* algebraically-defined behavioral sources (the ability to define voltage/current relations as an expression, like a spreadsheet or programming language)

* extended-precision numerical core (simulates circuits that make SPICE variants choke) http://www.edn.com/design/analog/4418707/1/Extended-precisio...

* frequency-domain analysis (Bode plots)

* parametric simulation sweeps over any parameter in any element

* export publication-quality vector PDF/EPS/SVG and raster PNGs of your schematics

* easily add custom elements with pins to represent any stuff you like (connectors, modules, etc)

* pure JS solution, or more specifically, CoffeeScript compiled to JS -- the creator of CoffeeScript said "an order of magnitude more [lines of code] than I've ever dealt with in a single project" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3644662 (and the LOC count has grown substantially since that comment!)

Yes, even as a contributor to an animated tool- I agree. A lot of "serious" design caculations and EDA work-flows are better done using a more traditional SPICE-like tool.

An interchange file format for schematics/netlists would be cool to help people swapping between types of analysis and tools.

Yet another app in the cloud that would work much better as a standalone software. It looks nice but I won't invest time learning software that may disappear with the company, is closed source and crippleware to boot.

Wow. The graphics are beautiful. The simulation is pretty standard; LTSpice can do most of the things this can. But the UI is nowhere near as good looking.

There's a nice feature - it tells you when you overloaded a component. LTSpice, for some reason, does not do this, even though the models and the simulation have the info to detect overload.

You can also tune circuit parameters and flip switches while simulation is running and immediately see how circuit responds.

There are a number of cool online circuit simulation tools and some are quite powerful.

Full disclosure: i am on the team building Multisim Live (https://beta.multisim.com) which is in this space.

Is Multidimensional live going to add microcontroller simulation, like Proteus?

How much premium costs? In my opinion sites should always display pricing before user signs up

Seems to me like they haven't decided on the premium pricing yet and that's why they state it only as "free access for a limited trial period".

You are correct. I'm not sure what the eventual pricing strategy will be.

The interactivity features are awesome. For non-interactive online simulation though I use https://www.partsim.com/ , which has a clunky UI but gives you the freedom to use SPICE.

If you happen to play Minecraft, you should also take a look at https://electrical-age.net/

It's not my own project -- I work on it, but the bulk of the code was written by an electrical engineer. I can state that it's about as good an electrical simulator as you're likely to get in that environment, though, which actually means pretty damn good.

It also allows for more... interesting worlds to play around in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5kpOQKNxFE

This looks interesting. How does it differentiate from other web simulation tools like CircuitLab, Multisim Live, and PartSim?

It's a mobile app.

It's really easy to use

Really long load time on browser, like a couple minutes. I'm used to circuitjs, which loads & simulates instantly.

It takes some time only on the first load. Sequential launched are quick.

Welcome to the webgl future!

EC is the best, most intuitive tool, you could use on an android device to simulate complex schematics. I've designed some of my best hifi amplifiers in EC. I warmly recommend it to anyone studying the area of electrical engineering, and to enthusiasts as well. Give it a few years,and you'll be pros ;)

EC is kind of hard to search for for someone with no knowledge of the electronics scene. What are you referring to?

EC is EveryCircuit - The name of the app

Oh. Thanks ;)

If only I had this 30 years ago!!! It was such a voodoo to make a circuit that worked.

I can relate, I got into programming instead :)

Looks very cool, but when I signed up on my phone, I was told that I have a 24 hour trial, after which I would need to pay $15. There didn't seem to be any indication of this before I started.

I started learning basic electronics circuits and arduino. I am using https://circuits.io/ which is also nice tool .

what kind of platform was used to develop this? Cool to see it running in the browser and on mobile.

Wasn't cool to see that it requires Google Chrome.

EveryCircuit runs C++ on across all platforms, at full speed. And Chrome is the only browser that supports C++ without requiring a plugin.

I don't know much about this but couldn't you use Emscripten and still get good performance?

Emscripten also has a wasm backend in progress it seems so if you begin using Emscripten today you might gain from that in the future?

Why not release a binary for Linux, Windows, etc.?

That seems to be a common sentiment. Not knowing anything about Chrome, what are the relative advantages and drawbacks of it for this type of application?

Does anyone know of any hydraulic or pneumatic schematic simulation tools like this? I've been wanting to make something like that for a number of years now, but haven't yet had the chance.

Also, I'd be curious to know more about the team behind EveryCircuit, what approach they took to managing simulation logic (eg: discrete vs continuous), and other nitty-gritty engineering details.

How does it compare to http://icircuitapp.com/, an app based on this classical simulation http://www.falstad.com/circuit/ ?

If you are affiliated with http://everycircuit.com/ please DM me on twitter (@0xbsec) to fix a reflected xss vulnerability. ( tho it's obvious so I think you are already notified ).

Has anyone found something similar to this that supports RF/Microwave circuits. This could do wonders to teaching the smith chart, matching impedance and so on.

Or what's the probability this site will add RF in the future?

I wouldn't say it has anything like proper support for RF, but our sim does have some transmission line examples which illusrate some of the principles. See for example: http://lushprojects.com/circuitjs/circuitjs.html?cct=$+1+5e-...

(More under Circuits->Transmission lines)

cool that their functionality improved this much so far.

how well does it converge and how accurate are these things? could be pretty useful for simple analog stuff.

This is very much along the lines of (at least the example in) Bret Victor's media for thinking the unthinkable. Looks great.

I really need one of these to be able to simulate vacuum tubes!

Should not be excessively hard to add (at least with cathode already fully heated).

Haha yes, you can use a depletion mode MOSFET most times as a sub. Getting accurate clipping sounds though is difficult (and critical for creating guitar amps).

You probably want LTSpice for that.

Lovely stuff!

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