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.
I’be been reading schematics for over 30 years, sometimes i need to draw one just to understand an idea that I have. These “real” drawings (like fritzing) hurt my head. They might be useful for the casual tinkerer but anyone who finds electronics interesting should learn the basic symbols.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
This would be useful for opensource hardware projects (aimed at beginners) to literally see how things are wired together. I'm still not at the schematic phase myself. But I use MS Paint wiring diagrams.
Falstad CircuitJS[0] is excellent and far better than the mess of a breadboard IMHO. It also allows easily instrumenting the circuits at multiple points so you can get a sense of the changes in ‘realtime’ without having to get (and learn to use) an oscilloscope (yet).
Breadboards, whilst initially appearing to be nice and accessible, tend to be a false economy when it comes to building a good intuition around a lot of fundamentals. This is because it’s a lot easier to reason about the basics with ‘perfect’ circuit and component behaviour than the messiness of reality. For example in a ‘perfect’ circuit wires can have no resistance or inductance (unless you want them to), in reality it’s unavoidable that they do, by how much will vary for reasons that may not be obvious to a beginner. I’m not saying breadboards are universally bad, they have a place but IMHO learning fundamentals directly through them ain’t it. I spent a long time stubbornly trying to learn things breadboard-first and in hindsight it was horrendously confusing versus drawing schematics, doing the math, and then playing in something like Circuit JS. It was only then that really important things started to really become second nature.
There’s also the other thing of being able to read documentation. If one wants to use some module in one’s project, the datasheet and application notes aren’t going to have breadboard-centric illustrations, they’re going to have schematics (or at least abstracted ones). I presume you come from a programming background, and so would know the importance of being able to read documentation, and knowing that if you can’t do that you’re pretty much dead in the water.
The hard part of learning about electronics is not identifying the components but getting a good understanding of what is happening in the circuit. For that, it’s better to have a learning tool which displays voltage and current at every part of the circuit all the time. Rather than something which prioritises looking like what you’d have on your desk as a constraint for its method of visual representation.
38 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 64.4 ms ] thread... Why so many requests for a static asset?
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 :)
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).
And I want it to be free/open-sourse ideally :)
> 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/)
This would be useful for opensource hardware projects (aimed at beginners) to literally see how things are wired together. I'm still not at the schematic phase myself. But I use MS Paint wiring diagrams.
OMG the wires flex, damn
0: https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html
Less for theory more visually "this wire goes here"
There’s also the other thing of being able to read documentation. If one wants to use some module in one’s project, the datasheet and application notes aren’t going to have breadboard-centric illustrations, they’re going to have schematics (or at least abstracted ones). I presume you come from a programming background, and so would know the importance of being able to read documentation, and knowing that if you can’t do that you’re pretty much dead in the water.
The hard part of learning about electronics is not identifying the components but getting a good understanding of what is happening in the circuit. For that, it’s better to have a learning tool which displays voltage and current at every part of the circuit all the time. Rather than something which prioritises looking like what you’d have on your desk as a constraint for its method of visual representation.