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.
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.
I've found a combination of circuitjs and a spice simulator to be quick for prototyping custom analog circuits (made mainly from discretes). Circuitjs https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html allows you to edit components live unlike spice simulators, but with the tradeoff of convergence issues for more complex circuits, so I use circuitjs as a playground then use LTspice as a rigorous simulator.
If it's a circuit made by composing multiple integrated circuits based on their application notes and not a custom analog design, I just use LTspice alone since you can just import the manufacturers spice behavioral model (assuming they didn't encrypt them...)
There are many. What's your (computing) platform and what are you trying to simulate?
The more professional tools (beginning with freebies like LTspice) are oriented around letting you probe waveforms from simulated inputs and are not as oriented towards interactive probing "does this LED light when I press that button?" as a hobbyist might want.
I personally reach for LTspice from Analog Devices first even if I have better available - it is quick, easy enough to use, and someone has ported the model you need to it already. There is a Mac version on their web site but I have never used it.
Micro-Cap is free-as-in-free-beer but windows-native and will do stability analysis (gain margin/phase margin).
Qucs-S + the backend simulator of your choice is probably your best bet for free software on Mac. Original Qucs is still developed (checkins last month on their github, if you want to try building from source) but hasn't had a release in almost ten years. QucsStudio is now uSimmics and is closed-source and Windows-native. They all have their peculiar uses. I haven't used any of them much.
Online you can use PartsQuest Explore for free for public designs and short simulation runs. I have not used the online version much but it is basically the very powerful Siemens (Mentor) VHDL-AMS simulator that has gone by a number of names (Mentor never commits to names) on the backend. I have used that: it came with PADS Standard Plus. It surprisingly does just about everything at least usably well. It can use spice models or VHDL-A(MS) models. It can use RF s-parameter models. It can use control-theory laplace-transform block models. It will do stability analysis and monte carlo analysis. It can run VHDL models. You can model just about anything you can write the ODEs for in VHDL-AMS: try viewing source on their motor model for example. You won't get the filter synthesis or analysis tools you'll find in a dedicated RF simulator like Keysight Pathwave. You won't get the controls design and analysis tools in the Matlab/Simulink toolkits. But it does a whole heck of a lot.
There are tons of free sim tools. 'Spice' (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) was a very early commercial sim. So many of the free ones use some variant of spice in their name. LTSpice, Qspice, etc.
Kicad is an excellent free schematic capture and simulation software.
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.
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.
I've found a combination of circuitjs and a spice simulator to be quick for prototyping custom analog circuits (made mainly from discretes). Circuitjs https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html allows you to edit components live unlike spice simulators, but with the tradeoff of convergence issues for more complex circuits, so I use circuitjs as a playground then use LTspice as a rigorous simulator.
If it's a circuit made by composing multiple integrated circuits based on their application notes and not a custom analog design, I just use LTspice alone since you can just import the manufacturers spice behavioral model (assuming they didn't encrypt them...)
There are many. What's your (computing) platform and what are you trying to simulate? The more professional tools (beginning with freebies like LTspice) are oriented around letting you probe waveforms from simulated inputs and are not as oriented towards interactive probing "does this LED light when I press that button?" as a hobbyist might want.
Thanks. I prefer Mac (maybe preferring online these days though). I do a lot of analog stuff with op-amps lately (analog computing).
I'm breadboarding with physical breadboards but they get messy/cluttered fast, ha ha.
I thought so. I'm a fan of Glider.
I personally reach for LTspice from Analog Devices first even if I have better available - it is quick, easy enough to use, and someone has ported the model you need to it already. There is a Mac version on their web site but I have never used it.
Micro-Cap is free-as-in-free-beer but windows-native and will do stability analysis (gain margin/phase margin).
Qucs-S + the backend simulator of your choice is probably your best bet for free software on Mac. Original Qucs is still developed (checkins last month on their github, if you want to try building from source) but hasn't had a release in almost ten years. QucsStudio is now uSimmics and is closed-source and Windows-native. They all have their peculiar uses. I haven't used any of them much.
Online you can use PartsQuest Explore for free for public designs and short simulation runs. I have not used the online version much but it is basically the very powerful Siemens (Mentor) VHDL-AMS simulator that has gone by a number of names (Mentor never commits to names) on the backend. I have used that: it came with PADS Standard Plus. It surprisingly does just about everything at least usably well. It can use spice models or VHDL-A(MS) models. It can use RF s-parameter models. It can use control-theory laplace-transform block models. It will do stability analysis and monte carlo analysis. It can run VHDL models. You can model just about anything you can write the ODEs for in VHDL-AMS: try viewing source on their motor model for example. You won't get the filter synthesis or analysis tools you'll find in a dedicated RF simulator like Keysight Pathwave. You won't get the controls design and analysis tools in the Matlab/Simulink toolkits. But it does a whole heck of a lot.
There are tons of free sim tools. 'Spice' (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) was a very early commercial sim. So many of the free ones use some variant of spice in their name. LTSpice, Qspice, etc.
Kicad is an excellent free schematic capture and simulation software.
Thanks. (And KiCad I am very familiar with already. I love that app.)