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AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits
- generj 13y agoI guess I'm not seeing the advantage over existing software. Unless there are some tie-ins with their other 123D software to, say, automatically create a hardware enclosure from a schematic.
- kbruneel 13y agoWe have that! Just push the "generate enclosure" button in the circuit details page.
- generj 13y agoCool! I'll have to check this out then. I love 123D in general, it's like Inventor, only free! That has long been my Achille's heel - I can EAGLE a pcb pretty easily, but woodworking / 3d interlocking Ponoko designs elude me.
- mbell 13y agoI wonder if it models the terrible parasitics of a real breadboard. I imagine it would be really annoying for beginners to build an IR receiver (or whatever) with the software, have it working perfectly, then try to build it on a real breadboard only to spend hours frustratingly trying to figure out why the circuit is oscillating.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoIs there any software out there that includes these real-world models into the design side?
- mbell 13y agoYes, but its usually not worth the time to include all parasitics in a model until you get to very high frequency work. Professional circuit/PCB designers already know roughly what the issues are going to be and can order of magnitude approximate well enough to know if its worth fully modeling or not. For novices, just understanding what the parasitics are is hard enough, much less adding them to a circuit that is often already fairly complicated for them. Most lower frequency stuff that novices will be building should not have an issue with parasitics, but pushin breadboards are just awful and the most common hobbyist op amps have plenty high enough gain-bandwidth-products to bring them into play.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoUmm, Spice[1]? I don't have a good model for a rusty piece of tin, but maybe someone does. [1] Like all cheapskates, I use LTSpice.
- nanospider 13y agoYes, you can use something like AWR or ADS. Although they cost megabucks.
- compumike 13y agombell is right -- rather than just adding parasitic capacitance and inductance estimates to every node, it's more helpful for the engineer to be able to evaluate and discover which nodes are particularly sensitive and which aren't. Start with some back-of-the-envelope order-of-magnitude estimates (maybe guess ~1nH/mm inductance for a wire, ~1pF capacitance between adjacent pins), and an experienced engineer will already be able to eyeball likely trouble spots in your circuit. The novice can certainly use the same concepts with simulation to do quite a bit of "debugging" in just a few minutes, for example dragging around a 1pF cap between a bunch of pins, re-running the simulation each time, and seeing where it has the most detrimental effect on an analog circuit.
- mbell 13y agoJust to add, if you want to 'fail safe' a breadboard design, your better off assuming ~25pF of stray capacitance per breadboard insertion point. You should also make sure your circuit bandwidth is less than ~8-10Mhz, keeping in mind that if you have an opamp with GBP of 20Mhz and you're using it with a gain of 2, you may have a problem. Stray inductance can also play a part, but it's far less likely.
- fein 13y agoYou can always measure the capacitance between each row. Hell of a lot better than building a full circuit first, just to find out your BB sucks.
- mbell 13y agoThat usually doesn't help as a large source of the problematic parasitics is contact between the part's leads and the 'grippers' inside the breadboard. Lead diameter, corrosion, 'gripper' spring strength, etc all come into play there.
- jonmrodriguez 13y agoSo if it's so random that you can't reliably measure it because it changes every time you plug and unplug the same pin (let alone different pin diameters), how can software hope to model it?
- stephengillie 13y agoEach time you virtually plug something in the program's breadboard, generate a random number. If the number is lower than a threshold, prevent the connection from working. Change the threshold at every program loading and randomly during use.
- jonmrodriguez 13y agoHaha I assume you're joking; that would give the user zero benefit and immense pain.
- mbell 13y agoWhen I say 'model it', I mean that loosely, perfect modeling of electronics circuits isn't realistic anyway, any modeling worth the effort will assume a range of possible values for anything under test. A simple example would be if the software warned the user that an active filter design was dangerously close to instability and thus had a decent chance of oscillating when real world parasitics are present.
- Brashman 13y agoWelcome to EE lab. In one lab as an undergrad, my partner and I found that we could get our circuit to work by attaching a capacitor with one end to our circuit and one end to a random place on the breadboard. It made for a bit of a funny circuit diagram in the write-up where one end of this capacitor was connected to nowhere.
- harrytuttle 13y agoEx EE here (RF/mixed signal). I always modelled it as everything being connected to everything via a tiny capacitor and a big resistor in parallel. This allowed a few odd scenarios to be reliably identified, especially in UHF frequencies and above. The trailing capacitor just had a large value invisible resistor attaching it to your circuit somewhere :)
- Scene_Cast2 13y agoHow do I add a voltage other than a 9V battery? What are the current alternatives to this? I'm looking to build an LED driver (possible IC candidates are Linear LT3477, TI TPS63020 and some other TI / Linear chips). I'd kill for a software that would simulate any chips (or even just a crude approximation of them).
- nullified 13y agoLTspice [0] is an excellent (and might I add free) SPICE simulator. Linear includes proper models of the majority of their chip lineup, including LED drivers. Their power supply IC models are also excellent. You can simulate a full LED driver circuit and a whole lot more with LTspice. TI also has a similar SPICE simulator [1], but it's not nearly as good, and its simulations are much slower and a bit more unreliable. I design electronics for a living, and I use LTspice all the time for power supply and analog circuit simulations. [0]: http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/#LTspice http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/#LTspice [1]: http://www.ti.com/tool/tina-ti http://www.ti.com/tool/tina-ti
- vonmoltke 13y agoWorth pointing out too that most major semiconductor vendors provide SPICE models for their parts. Maxim, for example, has an extensive set of models for their chips: http://www.maximintegrated.com/design/tools/modeling-simulation/spice/ http://www.maximintegrated.com/design/tools/modeling-simulat...
- Scene_Cast2 13y agoThanks, that helps a lot! Giving it a shot right now. How long should it take to make a high-power (3A+ @ 3V, buck-boost IC) LED driver, very approximately?
- nullified 13y agoIf by "make" you mean create the schematic in LTspice and simulate it, then I would guess about an hour or two (mostly because this might be your first time using LTspice). If Linear has a part that already meets those requirements, it should be a very straight forward affair.
- mrcharles 13y agoI'd kill for an app like this that would help teach you electronics at the same time. I've wanted to start doing some robotics stuff, but haven't found much in terms of useful learning resources outside of just buying a full university textbook and hoping for the best.
- stephengillie 13y agoBuy an Arduino/Launchpad/MSP430/other prototyping kit and start plugging things (motors/LEDs/other devices) into it. As long as all of your devices will work at the same voltage -- as long as everything is 5v or 3.3v or whatever -- they plug into breadboards like legos. It took me 3 months from buying my first Arduino to using an ultrasonic distance sensor to control an RC car motor. http://gilgamech.blogspot.com http://gilgamech.blogspot.com
- Bjorkbat 13y agoFunny you should mention that, I've been slowly working on this idea for a circuit-sim that basically teaches you electronics, to be eventually complemented with video-lectures which I keep putting off due to school and a hunger for other projects. So yeah, the Autodesk news was kinda depressing, but really, that just means I'm going to focus more on the teaching end and in adding my own personal style to it through quirky graphical elements that harken back to the 8-bit era of yore. Autodesk can't sell a product with soul. You can check it out if you want. Just to warn you though, my html abilities are a work-in-progress, so don't be surprised if you see some awful mistakes in there, or if it renders kinda funny if you have a small screen. www.bighugebreadboard.com I actually created it to teach myself electronics, so the biggest hurdle has been learning how various components work, and then adding them to the sim. Also, prior to this, my javascript knowledge was basically acquired through Codecademy. I'm also putting some of the code on a Github repo, as in I plan to make it open-source. Alas, before I did that I cleaned up some prior amateur's mistakes without thinking of the bugs I would be opening up. I should have them fixed by tomorrow morning. https://github.com/Bjorkbat/electricjs https://github.com/Bjorkbat/electricjs
- mrcharles 13y ago
- rglover 13y agoFor someone who's been looking for an easy point of entry into learning this stuff (me), this looks awesome.
- moron4hire 13y agoArduino is already the easy point of entry for learning this stuff. Stop talking about it and just do it.
- zachrose 13y agoIs this based on Fritzing (fritzing.org)?
- BuildTheRobots 13y agothat was the first thing to go through my mind -the graphics look _extremely_ familiar.
- ris 13y agoNope, just a non-free clone with a marketing budget. I must say I'm not sure how to feel watching the maker and hacker culture I love so much having its open heart slowly ripped out.
- voltagex_ 13y agoYou can look at it as a kind of validation of the community - there's commercial interest in it. Also, just because someone starts on this app, doesn't mean they won't move on to something else later.
- ris 13y agoWell, I agree if you s/validation/co-opting/ No, it doesn't necessarily mean they won't move on to something else later, but they're now living in a universe where it will always be Autodesk's job to make that harder or less obvious to them. By any means available.
- voltagex_ 13y agoI'm not sure keeping hobbyists locked to a particular platform is that useful to Autodesk, especially considering the prices they charge for higher level software. If it wasn't Autodesk doing this, would you have the same reaction? What about Makerbot's move away from open-source?
- ris 13y ago
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoOkay now we need a code debugger with breakpoints. Then, real hardware in the loop!
- kbruneel 13y agoWorking on it!
- qq66 13y agoIs this similar to Upverter?
- trekky1700 13y agoSure seems like it.
- gcb0 13y ago> it allows you to learn electronics using a virtual Arduino board and breadboard without blowing up capacitors or burning yourself with solder on your work table. With autodesk prices, i can probably buy enough caps and pay someone to solder for me.
- coldtea 13y agoPerhaps you're thinking of Autocad. They also sell dead cheap end user software, even on the iTunes store.
- nkurz 13y agoAll of their current 123D software is free for all: http://www.123dapp.com/create http://www.123dapp.com/create And I recently was impressed to learn that they offer free licenses for most of their professional software (including Autocad) to school teachers, university faculty, and degree seeking students. Qualifications: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=20307823&linkID=9240617 http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=12311... Software: http://students.autodesk.com/?nd=download_center http://students.autodesk.com/?nd=download_center
- moron4hire 13y agoI think there is a lot of value to blowing up your Arduino for reals. When you blow up a couple of Arduinos, you'll tend to force yourself to learn very quickly why it is happening and how to avoid it. What is so bad about "blowing up a capacitor" or "burning yourself with a soldering iron"? Capacitors are a few cents, each. Buy them in bulk and never worry about needing one again. Soldering iron burns are easy to avoid if you have spent any time in a kitchen. I feel like this is missing a big point. Arduino is the safe, easy entry point to learn electronics. The danger is miniscule, and whatever danger that is there, is part of the learning process. You need this as much as you need a rice-cooker simulator.
- matthudson 13y ago> "I feel like this is missing a big point. Arduino is the safe, easy entry point to learn electronics." An Arduino Uno costs about 25USD. Blowing up a few of those, or other components gets pricy. This service lowers the price of entry to almost zero, which is a pretty big deal for people with low disposable income or limited access to the hardware.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoThere are so many people that underestimated the potential success for Arduino, and the rPi. Also, experienced hardware folks tend to forget how unforgiving hardware can be to non-hardware folks, and beginners; a good example of which was posted here the other day. http://www.jwz.org/curtain/ http://www.jwz.org/curtain/
- computator 13y ago> so many people that underestimated the potential success for Arduino, and the rPi I like the Arduino and Raspberry Pi very much, but they are not the pioneers of this idea. There have been a whole bunch of electronic prototyping systems aimed at hobbyists in the decade before Arduino and Raspberry Pi hit it big. Just to name a few: Parallax Basic Stamp, the Micromint PicStic and Domino, X-10, MIT Media Lab's Programmable Bricks, Gumstix, Phidgets, Teensy USB Development Board, littleBits, LEGO Mindstorms, Bug Labs. I was cheering for several of the above, and they met with various degrees of success. It seemed obvious to me that they should become enormously popular, as big as the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi, but they didn't. There were probably dozens more that folded up and disappeared. What I'm trying to say is that it took a lot of iterations of design, business model, functionality, and being at the right time before a couple companies found just the right formula to make it really big.
- ddunkin 13y agoIt doesn't seem as in-depth as something more pure electronics like this: http://www.falstad.com/circuit http://www.falstad.com/circuit (also as iCircuit for iPhone)
- enobrev 13y agoReminds me of an old idea I had a couple years back. I assume it's a silly idea driven primarily by my own ignorance of these tools and EE in general, but it seemed fun. The idea was to start out with some software similar to this. Something visually impressive to keep it interesting for beginners, but technically sound to make it useful to those who know what they're doing. It would be open source, internet connected, easily accessible and most importantly simple to create and share ideas. From there, let people make some interesting things for school, work, play, whatever, ideally sharing said creations and try to raise a community around the tools and creations. The next stage would be to add a 3D rendering component which would allow people to create "machines" that could be run by their virtual electronics. Something like virtual fabrication. The ideal being to grow those interfaces and try to lead the community towards building virtual robots (that are technically feasible). The eventual goal would be to build a virtual world on top of all of the above tools. Something like MechWarrior, but with engineers and industrial designers building virtual mechs from the smallest components to the large mechanical fabrication and then getting into all out war against one-another, adding to the mix less technical players to partake in the human elements of combat (generals, soldiers, medics, scavengers for destroyed mechs, etc). Probably ridiculous, and if all went well I assume it would take years of work and planning, but it seemed like a fun idea to ponder.
- contingencies 13y agoI like it. Sort of like Mechwarrior meets Minecraft meets My University Education in Mollecular/Astrophysics. I suspect the major issues would be with time scaling between user perspectives (a huge issue in MMO games), the learning curve, interface and simulation accuracy.
- Brashman 13y agoThe kid in me loves it but simulation speed would be an issue. I don't know exactly what the simulation slowdown for circuits is, but just to give an idea, in a classroom setting, you're probably waiting a couple seconds for a simulation of a couple microseconds. Of course, this depends on factors such as simulation accuracy and circuit complexity, but it's unlikely you'd be able to scale up to robots. Intel processors take hours (days?) to simulate a couple seconds of operation at the circuit level.
- mflindell 13y agoThey really went out of their way to try and rip of Github, it seems like a lot of sites now would rather copy it because developers are used to the design.
- HNLogInShit 13y ago"The app runs in the browser" Oh well.