I appreciated that smoke comes out of the battery if you short it :)
Edit: I am ex EE. I will note that it's horrible using this view. It is marginally more horrible than using breadboards in reality. Schematics exist because reality tends to suck or have inconsistencies. For example TO-99 packages come in different pin orders, so 2N3904 has the opposite order to a BC547. Also breadboards tend not to have full length bus bars depending on vendors. At least though in this form it's an ideal representation though which doesn't have parasitic capacitors, inductors, dodgy contacts and no ground plane all over it.
It is good fun though :)
jhedwards 13 minutes ago [-]
Ah this reminds me of my first big mistake with PCBs. I have recently started down the hardware track, and my first PCB has a number of BC547 and BC558 transistors on it.
Once I had a functioning prototype, the next step was to convert it into a schematic. After that, you have to convert the schematic into a PCB. Now we are at two layers of translation, and at this step I made a mistake: I wanted to use SMD components to save money, and I found that the BC8xx transistors are the SMD equivalent of the BC5xx ones, so I used the footprint of the BC8xx transistors in my PCB, with no errors from KiCad.
As it turns out, the BC8xx footprint is not compatible with a BC5xx schematic! The pinout is different: the base is pin 1 instead of pin 2, so the components in my PCB that use transistors (crucially, the voltage controlled amplifier) didn't work. Unlike a bug, that mistake cost me $200 and weeks of development time, but after 10+ years of writing software I'm still happy to be making things that people can touch.
buescher 2 hours ago [-]
Schematics also help explain your circuit because the idioms of drawing them communicate intent. Which is one of the things the Shenzhen/Ladyada/Sparkfun/SeedStudio crowd don't get with their "schematic as data entry for layout" style. Some of them should know better.
Breadboards make me wince a little especially in a professional setting but I've made my peace with dev boards that come with DIP-style pins for them. Decent breadboards are so cheap now that every dev board get to live on its own permanent breadboard.
JKCalhoun 37 minutes ago [-]
"…schematic as data entry for layout style…"
Maybe you can explain.
Are you saying in these cases often the physical PCB layout follows the geometry of the schematic?
buescher 13 minutes ago [-]
I mean when they put parts down on the schematic and just attach net names to them. You know, the pull-up resistors in the corner with named nets on them, not shown attached to particular pins or buses. Usually with a dotted box drawn around them. Frequently horizontal.
Also usually totally implicit power routing. And no one that draws schematics that way has ever learned the value of drawing IC symbols to fit the circuit as opposed to the physical pinning of the device.
I'm working on a similar project, it's called schematik.io and you can use it to generate hardware projects (schematics, components lists, code, everything). Love the 3d viewer they've done here.
seanthemon 5 hours ago [-]
A more mature version of this is "CRUMB" found on steam, it costs money but it's got a lot of great features.
Steam: 78% positive reviews out of 675. $8.99. Windows-only, though the website says “CRUMB is available for iOS and Android along side its desktop counterparts on Windows and MacOS.”
Looks great, but pretty difficult to work with. Would be nice to be able to switch to top view to see more clearly where you're plugging things.
svennidal 4 hours ago [-]
Looks great, but pretty difficult to work with. Would be nice to be able to switch to top view to see more clearly where you're plugging things.
Edit: Clicking the background and dragging it actually gave me the top view I was looking for. Thank you goodcanadian.
That said, I still think this application is a better skillset demo than a practical tool to use.
goodcanadian 6 hours ago [-]
You can click the background and drag to rotate the view
lnenad 6 hours ago [-]
It's still clunky though. It's a great, cool thing that OP built but just not very practical.
KeplerBoy 5 hours ago [-]
Not a fan. The standard schematic abstraction is great and actually helps us parse circuits.
Don't add unnecessary complexity just because AIs are good at vibecoding threejs demos (edit: even if this particular demo seems to predate vibecoding and was likely used for training instead of being the product of inference).
asystole 2 hours ago [-]
So we're just using "vibe coded" as a generic insult now for project we don't like?
KeplerBoy 2 hours ago [-]
Well, it somehow gives off vibecoded vibes, even though it's not. Make of that what you want, but that's expressed in quite a few comments here.
Maybe it's just the extremely clean and generic presentation on the website without any links to the author / team / twitter.
dwringer 52 minutes ago [-]
For me there seems to be a listing of configurable settings or something but it only pops up for a single frame after I right-click-drag a component - this seems like a broken mouse interaction.
icedrift 3 hours ago [-]
On the contrary, when I was in high school we had one class dedicated to digital electronics and it revolved around breadboard circuitry. You only had 30 minutes/day to tinker with the physical hardware then it had to be disassembled for the next class. Simulations like this are more approachable then schematics and would have been great for tinkering outside of class.
throwaway290 43 minutes ago [-]
When I was a young child it was cool to play with circuitry (dad did some electronics) but as soon as I encountered components of different shape (a capacitor that looks like a resistor) it stopped making sense to me. thinking in schematics early is key
colesantiago 3 hours ago [-]
This is actually very cool and predates vibe coding, please stop gatekeeping.
KeplerBoy 2 hours ago [-]
I'll grant you the vibecoding comment. That was uncalled for and unjustified.
From an EE perspective I still see limited value in having a 3D breadboard. Having a standardized schematic language is really nice. Everybody knows how resistors, capacitors and transistors look like in a schematic, whereas they are all just little cuboids with varying number of pads in their smd packages. I recommend multisim blue for learning btw.
Nevertheless, a cool project and I should be more positive when commenting.
JKCalhoun 32 minutes ago [-]
Is there a good free circuit simulator (that use a schematic as interface, I assume)?
I somewhat agree with you in general though—if the web UX is a breadboard… maybe just get a breadboard? At the same time, while physical parts are generally cheap enough, power supplies, multimeters, an oscilloscope… that part of the hobby can add up.
Sometimes too I am waiting a week or two for a part to arrive from Mouser, it is nice to be able to mock up a circuit online.
IshKebab 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think the vibecoding jab is warranted, but I agree this is a pretty terrible UI for electronic circuits. Schematic capture exists for a reason! It's not even difficult for beginners to understand if you have a decent UX (which for some reason seems to elude 90% of PCB software).
globular-toast 4 hours ago [-]
Got to agree. This is kind of pointless. Breadboards exist to make it easier to build physical circuits. I would also argue there is paedagogical value in actually playing with a physical breadboard. Having to physically orient things in 3D space is a small price you pay for building a physical prototype. This is all the downsides with none of the upsides.
JKCalhoun 31 minutes ago [-]
The upsides are the measurement tools built in.
KeplerBoy 7 minutes ago [-]
You have those in all simulations.
antimony51 1 hours ago [-]
I could not sign up, because "email rate limit exceeded" but i was wondering if it had a feature to probe the voltage at a certain node.
1e1a 3 hours ago [-]
I feel like the fade-in animation when starting/stopping the simulation takes too long. Also, I think it would be helpful if the currently connected row was highlighted when dragging a pin.
hippich 2 hours ago [-]
Are there similar solutions without 3d view? I want to get a simulator that can show me what is going in the circuit, ideally slowed down a lot. For example I was making a dongle with resistor and capacitor which was delivering a pulse-short (i.e. removing power for a short period of time instead of delivering an impulse) and while I was able to confirm overall idea with some online simulator, dialing in capacitance and resistance required physically switching components. Ideally I want to be able simulate such transient effects and arrive at specific numbers ready to be soldered.
And I want it to be free/open-sourse ideally :)
pedro_caetano 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like you are looking for a SPICE like simulator, there are quite a few free/open:
orcad is the commercial classic for doing schematics with a spice backend. (spice is an oss engine out of berkeley for simulating circuits on computers. for dc it just solves the classic nodal analysis and for ac you can feed in things from a fantasy signal generator and capture things at various nodes in the circuit) there's also some pretty cool looking commercial web thing now that also will maintain netlists with real-time prices and will let you swap parts out and set minimum quantities etc.
kicad is the oss orcad, but i never got good at it. (to be fair, orcad was weird to learn as well)
buescher 2 hours ago [-]
Some people like Everycircuit and Falstad for that.
krupan 2 hours ago [-]
Nice! You can play Electroboom without actually getting shocked. If you do want the real world experience you can get bags full of components on Amazon for pretty cheap
myself248 1 hours ago [-]
The simulation needs an "Amazon factor" slider, which randomly makes:
* All breadboard wires have some resistance
* Some breadboard wires have very high resistance
* Some breadboard wires have intermittent contact, recalculated every time components are added/removed from the breadboard
* Some fraction of polarized capacitors are backwards
* All capacitors are overrated for voltage and explode at 70-99% of their rating
* Some LEDs smoke at 10% of their rated forward current
* Brightness variation between LEDs that should be identical
* Semiconductors may randomly be another semiconductor in the same class (e.g. a "2n2222" may in fact be any other NPN BJT in the simulation, or the parameters may be entirely random)
* Inductors have 80% variation in core saturation specs, but other parameters are spot-on
* Any component with writable flash (eg USB vid/pid strings) may randomly not actually have writable flash but instead fixed strings and the writes fake success but the values do not change
buescher 1 hours ago [-]
Better simulators can do parameter sweeps and monte carlo simulations so you can explore tolerance stackup issues. But most of the failure modes you've listed there are just why you shouldn't build your circuits for one on breadboards and for another with dodgy parts sourced outside of distribution channels.
wasmainiac 3 hours ago [-]
This was done before, years ago, but in 2D. I forget what it was called. It was like an LT Spice clone with better UX.
No one realistically speak SVG. Human consciousness isn't a software built on language. Speech center is just a part of a human brain.
bandrami 5 hours ago [-]
There used to be some really good web-based SPICE interpreters but I can't find them now. This was before javascript ate everything, so you would enter the netlist, click a button, and get a GIF or the current at a specified terminal or whatever
eqvinox 5 hours ago [-]
Well, SPICE is still around in its zillion forks and dialects…
AIUI the best frontend is kicad, though I never really tried that, I just wrote the text files by hand.
bandrami 5 hours ago [-]
OK the smoke was really funny
NooneAtAll3 6 hours ago [-]
lacks exception catching for when webgl is disabled
dorongrinstein 4 days ago [-]
wow. looks amazing
sschueller 3 hours ago [-]
Lol, it simulates magic smoke as well.
shakna 5 hours ago [-]
Holy requests, batman.
... Why so many requests for a static asset?
lm28469 4 hours ago [-]
Because it's yet another slopware of course
folli 3 hours ago [-]
Please don't. The project is around since at least 2022.
lm28469 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
post-it 3 hours ago [-]
Hey man, I've seen you posting salty comments a lot recently. Are you sure you're getting a positive experience out of this forum? I spend a lot of time online and when I start posting the way you do, I find that a day or two of minimizing screen time does wonders.
lm28469 3 hours ago [-]
It's very positive don't worry about me, if you need a safe space echo chamber feel free to ignore me!
Edit: I am ex EE. I will note that it's horrible using this view. It is marginally more horrible than using breadboards in reality. Schematics exist because reality tends to suck or have inconsistencies. For example TO-99 packages come in different pin orders, so 2N3904 has the opposite order to a BC547. Also breadboards tend not to have full length bus bars depending on vendors. At least though in this form it's an ideal representation though which doesn't have parasitic capacitors, inductors, dodgy contacts and no ground plane all over it.
It is good fun though :)
Once I had a functioning prototype, the next step was to convert it into a schematic. After that, you have to convert the schematic into a PCB. Now we are at two layers of translation, and at this step I made a mistake: I wanted to use SMD components to save money, and I found that the BC8xx transistors are the SMD equivalent of the BC5xx ones, so I used the footprint of the BC8xx transistors in my PCB, with no errors from KiCad.
As it turns out, the BC8xx footprint is not compatible with a BC5xx schematic! The pinout is different: the base is pin 1 instead of pin 2, so the components in my PCB that use transistors (crucially, the voltage controlled amplifier) didn't work. Unlike a bug, that mistake cost me $200 and weeks of development time, but after 10+ years of writing software I'm still happy to be making things that people can touch.
Breadboards make me wince a little especially in a professional setting but I've made my peace with dev boards that come with DIP-style pins for them. Decent breadboards are so cheap now that every dev board get to live on its own permanent breadboard.
Maybe you can explain.
Are you saying in these cases often the physical PCB layout follows the geometry of the schematic?
Also usually totally implicit power routing. And no one that draws schematics that way has ever learned the value of drawing IC symbols to fit the circuit as opposed to the physical pinning of the device.
> Decided to shutdown Diode. (For now the site is live, I'll likely open-source the code in case anyone wants to take the baton and run)
Kenneth is now working on RMFG (https://www.rmfg.com/)
Steam: 78% positive reviews out of 675. $8.99. Windows-only, though the website says “CRUMB is available for iOS and Android along side its desktop counterparts on Windows and MacOS.”
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198800/CRUMB_Circuit_Sim...
No affiliation.
Edit: Clicking the background and dragging it actually gave me the top view I was looking for. Thank you goodcanadian. That said, I still think this application is a better skillset demo than a practical tool to use.
Don't add unnecessary complexity just because AIs are good at vibecoding threejs demos (edit: even if this particular demo seems to predate vibecoding and was likely used for training instead of being the product of inference).
Maybe it's just the extremely clean and generic presentation on the website without any links to the author / team / twitter.
From an EE perspective I still see limited value in having a 3D breadboard. Having a standardized schematic language is really nice. Everybody knows how resistors, capacitors and transistors look like in a schematic, whereas they are all just little cuboids with varying number of pads in their smd packages. I recommend multisim blue for learning btw.
Nevertheless, a cool project and I should be more positive when commenting.
I somewhat agree with you in general though—if the web UX is a breadboard… maybe just get a breadboard? At the same time, while physical parts are generally cheap enough, power supplies, multimeters, an oscilloscope… that part of the hobby can add up.
Sometimes too I am waiting a week or two for a part to arrive from Mouser, it is nice to be able to mock up a circuit online.
And I want it to be free/open-sourse ideally :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_electronics_circu...
kicad is the oss orcad, but i never got good at it. (to be fair, orcad was weird to learn as well)
* All breadboard wires have some resistance
* Some breadboard wires have very high resistance
* Some breadboard wires have intermittent contact, recalculated every time components are added/removed from the breadboard
* Some fraction of polarized capacitors are backwards
* All capacitors are overrated for voltage and explode at 70-99% of their rating
* Some LEDs smoke at 10% of their rated forward current
* Brightness variation between LEDs that should be identical
* Semiconductors may randomly be another semiconductor in the same class (e.g. a "2n2222" may in fact be any other NPN BJT in the simulation, or the parameters may be entirely random)
* Inductors have 80% variation in core saturation specs, but other parameters are spot-on
* Any component with writable flash (eg USB vid/pid strings) may randomly not actually have writable flash but instead fixed strings and the writes fake success but the values do not change
One project that comes to mind for high-level programming style circuits-as-code:
https://github.com/atopile/atopile
Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39263854 More recent HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44548449
SPICE. You're describing SPICE. :)
AIUI the best frontend is kicad, though I never really tried that, I just wrote the text files by hand.
... Why so many requests for a static asset?