Simulating Circuits

There are a lot of different tools that can do simulation (LTSpice being perhaps the most famous), but as I was working on drawing all these schematics for explaining electronics here in Fusion360, I ran across an amazing tool written by Paul Falstad. I'm not sure he has a formal name for it, but we'll call it circuitjs. This allows for very accurate simulation of a circuit with observability. There are other tools, like CircuitLab, which are also quite useful.

Understanding and Interacting

I'm not going to go into all the schematic symbols, as those are covered elsewhere, but a few things to keep in mind when looking at them:

• Green indicates a positive voltage potential across the section in that color.
• Red indicates negative voltage potential across the section.
• Gray indicates ground, earth, or just zero potential.
• Yellow dots indicate the movement of current, in the conventional direction.

Along the bottom are scopes showing the measurement of various characteristics in the circuit. Hovering over the lines will get you specific details at that exact point in time.

You can interact with the circuit! You can press the "RUN/Stop" button to start and stop the circuit. The "Reset" will return it back to where it started from all your modifications. Finally, there are sliders on the right hand side that control not just the speed of simulation and the speed at which the current is visualized, but often other sliders to control parts of the circuit.

You can click on a switch to turn it on or off. If you hover over a component, you'll get some more information on the component and the current state will be shown in the bottom right corner. You can also modify components. If you double click (left click on them), you can edit them and modify their characteristics.

Once again, amazing thanks to Paul for this amazing tool, along with Iain Sharp who made the original Javascript port.

Accuracy of Simulation

I'm just going to quote Iain here:

Physics simulations are not real life, and don't assume that simulation and reality are identical! This simulation idealizes many components. Wires and component leads have no resistance. Voltage sources are ideal - they will try and supply infinite current if you let them. Capacitors and inductors are 100% efficient. Logic gate inputs draw zero current - not too bad as an approximation for CMOS logic, but not typical of 1980s TTL for example. By all means use this simulator to help visualize circuits, but always test in reality.

Sorry to break it to you folks, but the simulator numerically approximates models of components that are also approximate. Even without allowing for any bugs it is just a rough guide to reality. This simulator may be helpful for visualization, but used the wrong way any simulator can give a false sense of security. Some people don't really grasp this important concept - I've even had one user accuse the simulator of "lying" because he (or she) didn't take account of the component idealizations and didn't understand the actual performance of the components they chose to use. It's a key leaning for all electronic engineers that they must always be fully aware of real-world component (and system) characteristics and how these differ from any particular simulator they use. If you want more precise models of real-world components then the SPICE-based simulators are much more appropriate tools than this one, but even then, you should be aware of deviations from reality. As the great analogue circuit designer Bob Pease said "When a computer tries to simulate an analog circuit, sometimes it does a good job; but when it doesn't, things get very sticky".

One consequence of the use of ideal components is that the simulator doesn't converge on a result for circuits that have no defined behaviour - for example an ideal voltage source short-circuited by an ideal wire. Another situation that can't be simulated under these assumptions is the current distribution between the conductors if two perfect conductors are connected in parallel. When using the simulator you must account for places where real electronics differs from the ideal.