Collaborative Circuit Design & Simulation in the Browser | Hacker News Reader

Collaborative Circuit Design & Simulation in the Browser

medium.com

29 pointsrock_hard10 comments

I'm a Flux user. There are two ways Flux provides value to my company. First, we improved our workflow, gone are the days when each of us was just throwing our work over the fence to the next. Second, we spent less time theorizing about whether every change will break the circuit or not. Regarding the simulator, I tried using LTSPICE and other simulators in the past but the workflow was always cumbersome and the limited availability of simulation models for parts combined with the very steep learning curve of building my own made it impractical. Flux documents are our virtual workbenches now, where we can have multiple variations of design set up next to each other, with virtual testing gear and tools. Regarding collaboration, man what a game changer! We now can just quickly share a link and get our heads together over a design decision and implement a solution. The founders, Matthias, Chris, and Lance, didn't ask me to write this. I chose to write it because it's a great product that I think can help a lot of teams & people.

Thanks for joining the private beta! Glad to see you're getting some utility from Flux. We're excited to see what you build with it.

When you have something that's ready for anybody to try out, feel free to get in touch and we can help you edit a Show HN, similar to the process we do for the YC launches at https://news.ycombinator.com/launches. Same offer goes for anybody - just understand that it may take a long time to get back to you.

Thank you dang for your offer, that sounds great. I’ll get in touch with you as soon as we are ready for Show HN.

Hey guys, I’m Chris and one of the founders of Flux and super stoked to present you a first beta of our tool. Building hardware easily in the browser is such a game changer for us.

Let me know if you have any questions for us, I’ll be around here for a while.

Very cool! Reminds me of a more niche version of Figma. Being able to export the KiCAD schematic is quite nice.

Thanks! Yes, we were really inspired by how Figma has helped designers and their teams collaborate. In the same way that Figma has invited more non-designers into the design process, I feel Flux will invite more non-hardware people into the product development process.

Yep, exporting and importing from KiCAD and other software is critical for many workflows. We are continuing to add more import/export capabilities according to demand from our private beta users.

Hi everyone! I’m a cofounder of Flux and excited to invite you to our private beta. It’s my hope that we can help hardware teams build better products through modern collaboration, live simulation, and a community generated library of parts.

I’ll be around to answer any questions for the next few hours!

What are you using to synchronize state across users?

Hi Greg, We have two mechanisms for the state we use. The first one is web sockets for our multiplayer features like keeping our real-time cursors for multiplayer smooth.

For the document state (the circuit document) we are using Google's Firestore to keep the state synced across users. One of the problems we encountered is that documents can become quite large and always sending the whole latest states can even cause state issues by overwriting other changes if they are made at the wrong time. So we added some custom logic to always keep a full document ready for users who do the first load to be quick, and once you loaded the document you directly get the updates in granular changes synced as patch set itself. This allows users to locally jump back and forth in the time since each patch is essentially like an atomic change committed by the user and tracked in the version history.

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