Free electronics circuit diagrams | Hacker News Reader

Free electronics circuit diagrams

free-circuits.com

37 pointsmladenija7 comments

Meh... A mash-up site, that took circuits from other sites, and reposted them. They did give credit to those sites, but I'd still be pissed if they took circuits from my site.

However, a community on electronic design (ala sci-electronics-design from the old days) but with a stack-overflow type of interface, but augmented with an integrated simple javascript powered cad package to allow askers and answerers to communicate with consistently rendered drawings of the circuits. Now THAT would be a site I would hang out on.

sci.electronics.design still exists, and there's still some good stuff mixed among the nntp spam and political arguments.

Good point about an integrated CAD package--while some sed posters do great ASCII art schematics, many do not and it can be hard to follow.

I visited it a few months ago, and left with a heavy heart. It seems almost useless, with all the spam.

There are still some good guys buried in the noise: Phil Hobbs, John Larkin, Jim Thompson, Joerg, James Arthur, Tim Wescott, Tim Shoppa, and Spehro Pefhany, among others.

I haven't seen much from Winfield Hill lately. Hopefully (fingers crossed) he's too busy working on the 3rd edition of AoE to spend time on usenet.

On a somewhat related topic. I find Paul Falstad's circuit simulator applet simply amazing. I had spent hours playing with it. (http://falstad.com/circuit/) [that page will start a Java applet).

Checkout his other physics applets. I like all the Quantum ones along with the antenna simulator.

I think his 555 timer is busted it seems to be missing a ground pin IIRC.

Also I tried making simple circuit, connecting a voltage source to a capacitor to ground, and it kept oscillating which isn't the right behavior.

I tried emailing the author but never heard back.

http://www.opencircuits.com/ is another great circuits website.

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