I can't believe I just bought a 3-day-old app for $8.
Sigh.
Looks great from the screenshots and forum posts, and I've been meaning to dive into component-level electronics for a while. I've tried to do so in the past and never seem to have the time and inclination while I'm near my workbench. Here's hoping this will let me learn enough to be able to "graduate" to the next level, and actually create some useful things at the bench instead of just trying to learn there.
Imagine driving to a computer store in the late 70s or 80s, and buying a floppy disk in a stapled plastic sandwich baggie with some Xeroxed documentation stapled to it for $20. In 1980 dollars.
I was pretty happy to buy this app this morning for $8 2022 dollars - the current price of an ice cream cone.
I was at the thrift store last night and found someones cache of complete old sim games for PC. Sim Coaster, Sim city, etc. all for $1.99. I realized - I don't have a CD drive anymore.
I got in on the tail end of that in the 90s. I vividly remember buying "old" computers at church bazaars and rummage sales, then begging my parents for money to buy dusty old games on 5.25" floppy at my local Radio Shack.
I would be massively happy to spend $8 dollars on an app. 99/100 the app is what I want but it's free with massive ads and/or some kind subscription/micro transaction model.
Subscriptions have gone completely off the deep end. This app[1] is a perfect example of how crazy they can get. It's an app that is completed as far as I can tell and I don't know what more features you could add to it. It's not like blackjack changes. They charge a $1.29/month or $12.99/year subscription. I'd happily pay $10 or even $15 for it but there's no way in hell I'm subscribing to a finished app.
"There is also a Desktop Based version in development which offers a much wider range of tools, deeper analysis and extras such as schematic views and PCB layouts"
This. You can feel the author’s excitement about teaching electronics and emphasis intuition over rigorous mathematics proofs.
An example is that they talk about opamps as Lego blocks and how it can be configured to be an amp, a filter, a buffer, an inverter, an oscillator, a switch!
Instead of teaching a bunch of theoretical knowledge, which is important for certain things, they get you thinking how to use analog electronics to do stuff!
When I first got into electronics about 10 years ago I started by doing most of the experiments in "Make: Electronics." It starts at a level where you could probably have fun doing most of the experiments with your 8-12 year old kids, were you to have them. The author of that recommends moving on to, "Practical Electronics for Inventors." Personally, I started reading, "The Art of Electronics" afterward.
This is mostly a popular tinkerer's cookbook. If you like a more structural, engineering approach, then the suggestion of Lipiansky's book in another comment is much better.
Includes interactive circuit simulations powered by CircuitLab https://www.circuitlab.com/ which runs in browser. And yes, the vast majority of our users are on laptop/desktop, not mobile/tablet. I don’t think engineering/design/simulation is moving to a phone form factor anytime soon :)
I’d still really recommend getting your hands dirty, getting off the simulator and go build something in the real world. Even if you don’t have an oscilloscope to start, just a solderless breadboard, a pack of resistors, maybe some switches and potentiometers and transistors and LEDs, and a few multimeters, and you can probably accomplish quite a bit of hands-on learning.
Thanks for this! Great looking start to a book and I like CircuitLab from initial impressions. Looking forward to seeing the book fill out.
A thousand times I'd back the encouragement to get your hands dirty with this stuff. When you do get an oscilloscope it's like a whole new world opens up too. For basic hobbyist purposes even a simple 25MHz oscilloscope can be plenty. The EEVBlog forums have great recommendations for equipment (e.g. [1]) for hobbyists and resources for beginners [2] as well.
Micro-Cap was released for free, no license required.
Windows only (although I recall of a Mac version decades ago), but runs perfectly under Linux+WINE.
In school, I worked on an introductory CS/EE class many, many moons ago, and I believed we used something like "logisim", which by then was pretty awesome - you could build simple things like adders, combine those with "macros" to bui;d ALUs and then whole simple CPUs.
Since then, the logisim project has discontinued, but it looks like there is a open source successor:
Have not tried it, but it looks promising, provided you don't want to do too complicated things (not sure if you could really model complex CPUs like a pentium with it). Also, it's pretty digital only, so I wouldn't expect Mac-Spice-like analog circuit simulation.
I remember the guy behind VoltSim posting his project on reddit some months ago, claiming he wrote the circuit simulation under the hood from scratch by himself.
When he was called out that all his components used the same values and variable names as falstad [1], implying he just ported falstad's circuit sim to android, he deleted his post.
Looks like he still has his app on the app store and is still not honoring the open source license and not giving proper credit to falstad's circuit simulation.
And now he even put many components behind paid "extension packs" and wants to make money from falstad's work.
The answer: no. It has a small variety discrete 74-series components (NAND, NOR, inverters, flipflips decoders, multiplexers, etc), 555 timer, counters, a RAM and an EPROM, and little else. A great start, but not what I was hoping for. But maybe it will be some day?
The development page shows what's included.[0] As far as logic chips go, it has a dozen or so of the most common 7400 series ICs (with more planned), the venerable 555, and a 2K*8 EEPROM (28C16). An HD44780-based LCD is in progress.
This is pretty exciting! I really hope it can be part of some to help inspire more involvement , creativity and innovation on the hardware front!
I’m a huge fan of hardware but it’s just seem not feasible professionally when software offers something like 3-5x compensation, cost of development/experimentation/training is practically negligible, and hardware seems like such a ivory tower… * sigh *
