Is there an electronics emulator?

[earlz]

Is there an electronics emulator out there? I don't care if it's something you must program(like an API) or if it is just an ordinary program that lets you place the things like resistors and transistors and such...

If I had any kind of electronics experience for the values and such produced, I'd probably attempt to make an API for myself with my shiny new C++ skills, but I don't...

[Alboin]

gEDA might be what your looking for. However, there is no maintained Windows port. (Albeit, they say it might be compilable under Windows due to GTK's nature, but nevertheless.)

[pcmattman]

If I had any kind of electronics experience for the values and such produced, I'd probably attempt to make an API for myself with my shiny new C++ skills, but I don't...

Well, wouldn't XOR, OR, AND, NOT gates be easy?

It's the transistors, resistors, and related circuitry that is really hard. If you start it, I'll help

Looked at gEDA, it's installed via a 128 MB disk image...

[jhawthorn]

Looked at gEDA, it's installed via a 128 MB disk image...

For me apt-get install gEDA only needed to pull in 4MB of packages.

As Alboin mentioned, all the dependencies seem to have windows ports. So theoretically all you need to do is download the source and build it. Compiling against GTK on windows is, indeed, a pain, but quite doable.

[AJ]

If you are looking for something to emulate processors (in this case 8-bit Atmel AVR microcontrollers), try something like VMLab http://www.amctools.com/ - I used to use this for testing my 8 bit OS's before flashing them to a chip.

Cheers,
Adam

[jnc100]

I remember something called crocodile clips whilst I was at school. It allowed you to just drag and drop various components into a circuit. I remember making a calculator in it, but it was incredibly slow.

Regards,
John.

[Kevin McGuire]

There are some good digital simulators out there in Google. But from my experience most are highly technical with a steep learning curve especially when you want to simulate analog electronics. You also have limitations because of precisions. Certain (analog) designs are not modeled correctly unless you know what you are doing or at least going from design to actually soldering parts down could be a nasty surprise for instance:

You might simulate a Darlington pair using two NPN transistors which produce extremely high gain (I have always only had silicon to experiment with). You move this to a actual physical board with real components:

• Transistors might pop and sizzle. (They really do, also can got so hot as to leave a slightly painful impression in finger. CAREFUL) [Too much total power.]
• You're breath and wind on the circuit could cause it to perform nothing like in the simulation.
• Oscillations... feed back.. and all sorts of other crazy never expected anomalies.

The best electronics simulator (analog) would be to order/buy:

• breadboard
• PNP/NPN transistors
• some CMOS chips(binary counter, 555 timer, OR/AND/XOR gates
• OPAMPS(Can be comparators too)
• resistors
• jumper wires (maybe two packs)
• ceramic capacitors
• electrolytic capacitors
• diodes
• LEDS (visible light and infrared)
• battery (or better is a transformer - ripped from a old radio or something similar -- substitution for a battery).

You can also find if you look and should always find in a catalog what is called Electronic Learning Kits. You have to be careful that you closely inspect them description or box - and open it - to determine if it is going to be of a level you would enjoy. For example one that has springs for connectors with a lot of components already attached (springs for terminals) would be really great. Also try to find one with a breadboard in the middle or somewhere on it so you can do your own experimentations which I know you will want to once you get board of doing the book exercises. Most cases the book will use the breadboard.

I say this all from experience as I have toyed with it for years. I remember when I had a handful of transistors and only a remote idea of how to use them. I though they worked just like a on/off switch back, but they are a little more complicated than that and it turns out the complicated part if actually the most useful part.

I do not have a oscilloscope, but if you are really interested in (analog) electronics then you *NEED* on. It is very difficult to debug a circuit by changing out component values with others.

[Solidus117]

I suggest PSPICE Student Edition by OrCAD. Great for analyzing analogue circuits.

I also support gEDA. Very capable software.

[AndrewAPrice]

I once remember playing with this electronics simulator. It was one of those $10,000 proprietary Windows packages (I forget its name). It was really cool, you could design analogue and digital circuits, place ROM and RAM on the board, came along with pre-designed 4, 8, 16, and 32-bit microprocessors (which were fully editable), and had a customisable built in compiler/assembler for building writing code which you could store on the ROM chip.

It even had VGA and LCD interfaces, speakers, an RJ-45 bridge, and a direct keyboard interface, which you could do whatever you like with (like attach a virtual monitor to to output information).

I remember loading a Pac Man arcade machine template, which took about 10 minutes to set up the project folder, and about another 10 minutes to build the simulation (which ran at an acceptable speed). It also exported all the schematics, board layouts, cabinet layout, where everything is placed in the cabinet, source code for the game, and any other user documentation (like the How To Play and How To Setup guide) into a single PDF.

I would love to get my hands on it again, if only I knew the name If only I had $10k to spend

[binutils]

http://opencollector.org/