Posted by rossant 4 days ago
This would be useful for opensource hardware projects (aimed at beginners) to literally see how things are wired together. I'm still not at the schematic phase myself. But I use MS Paint wiring diagrams.
OMG the wires flex, damn
* All breadboard wires have some resistance
* Some breadboard wires have very high resistance
* Some breadboard wires have intermittent contact, recalculated every time components are added/removed from the breadboard
* Some fraction of polarized capacitors are backwards
* All capacitors are overrated for voltage and explode at 70-99% of their rating
* Some LEDs smoke at 10% of their rated forward current
* Brightness variation between LEDs that should be identical
* Semiconductors may randomly be another semiconductor in the same class (e.g. a "2n2222" may in fact be any other NPN BJT in the simulation, or the parameters may be entirely random)
* Inductors have 80% variation in core saturation specs, but other parameters are spot-on
* Any component with writable flash (eg USB vid/pid strings) may randomly not actually have writable flash but instead fixed strings and the writes fake success but the values do not change
SPICE. You're describing SPICE. :)
One project that comes to mind for high-level programming style circuits-as-code:
https://github.com/atopile/atopile
Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39263854 More recent HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44548449
AIUI the best frontend is kicad, though I never really tried that, I just wrote the text files by hand.