
Collaborative Circuit Design & Simulation in the Browser - rock_hard
https://medium.com/buildwithflux/flux-is-the-collaborative-circuit-design-platform-youve-been-waiting-for-72dd7fcc2654
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jbarrozo
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.

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lwcassid
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.

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dang
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/launches).
Same offer goes for anybody - just understand that it may take a long time to
get back to you.

~~~
blank0
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.

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blank0
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.

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

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lwcassid
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.

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lwcassid
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!

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greg
What are you using to synchronize state across users?

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blank0
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.

