Are there softwares to simulate enough electronics and microcontrollers to learn?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨wos@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨askelectronics@discuss.tchncs.de⁩

I wanted to learn more about electronics, and I found this www.open.edu/openlearn/…/content-section-0 to start from so I can have a grasp on theories first, and I want to try learning microcontrollers afterwards but I can’t afford to buy any IRL atm, are there any softwares to simulate them to assist on learning without having the physical hardware? I’d be happy if anyone could give me any tips toward that, thank you if you read this far

source

Comments

Sort:hotnew top

lime@feddit.nu ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Depends on what your focus is. If you want to build understanding of electronic components and how they interact through experimentation, Paul Falstad’s circuit simulator is a great start.

If you want to focus on digital logic, Logisim is great.

But here’s the thing: A microcontroller is controlled only through code. You want to learn electronics, you can simulate those. You want to learn about a specific microcontroller, read the manual for that controller.

You want to code on a microcontroller, get a microcontroller.

The raspberry pi pico is $4.

source
Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

Are there softwares to simulate enough electronics and microcontrollers to learn?

It depends on what you are looking for. For a quick simulation to get a very rough, and more ideal, visual, you can use something like Falstad. But for anything more practical and useful, I’d recommend using SPICE. There’s lot’s of software out there that implements SPICE [2]. KiCAD offers SPICE simulation [1].

References
1. “SPICE Simulation”. KiCAD. Accessed: 2024-11-21T02:26Z. www.kicad.org/discover/spice/. 2. “List of free electronics circuit simulators”. Wikipedia. Published: 2024-09-07T14:19Z. Accessed: 2024-11-21T02:31Z. en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_free_electronics_circu….

I want to try learning microcontrollers afterwards but I can’t afford to buy any IRL atm

The perceived expensiveness of things is certainly relative, but I would still argue that the hardware for microcontrollers really doesn’t have to be that expensive [1][2][3][4].

References
1. “Pocket AVR Programmer”. Sparkfun. Accessed: 2024-11-21T02:36Z. www.sparkfun.com/products/9825. 2. “Raspberry Pi Pico”. CanaKit. Accessed: 2024-11-21T02:37Z. www.canakit.com/raspberry-pi-pico.html?cid=cad&sr…. 3. “ATMEGA328P-PU-ND”. DigiKey. Accessed: 2024-11-21T02:37Z. www.digikey.ca/en/products/detail/…/1914589. 4. “Arduino Uno Rev3”. Arduino Store. Arduino CC. Accessed: 2024-11-21T02:40Z. store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-uno-rev3.

source
evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Looks like wikipedia has good lists.

en.m.wikipedia.org/…/Comparison_of_EDA_software

…wikipedia.org/…/List_of_free_electronics_circuit…

I’ve never used it, but I am intrigued by fritzing, can anyone recommend?

source
- Live2day@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Ive never used it but I know a lot of the people in the Arduino space use fritzing for PCB design
  
  source
BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I think tinkercad is a great place to start. It’s browserbased and doesn’t cost money. It may not have a lot of components, but it still have quite a few more than just resistors, caps and inductors. And it is aimed at newbies and hobbyists, which is reflected in range of the available components. Being able to drag an Arduino into your sketch and have it run your program is neat.

We used to use yenka, when I taught electronics. It was OK for teaching, but I don’t know if I’d recommend it for self-paced learning as a hobbyist. It costs money, requires software installation and is so much more than just electronics that navigating the program can be difficult. And default settings explodes components when you put too much current through them, that alway annoyed me.

source
TomAwezome@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Give CRUMB a try, I’ve used it for learning basic circuit designs, and it does a pretty good job! I think a great start is trying to get a basic 555 timer going in it, based on publicly available electrical diagrams and descriptions. The analog oscilloscope feature is super fun to play with.

…steampowered.com/…/CRUMB_Circuit_Simulator/

source
poplargrove@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Proteus (closed source, paid) has a whole range of microcontrollers, and I’ve found it to be great (pirated it). There is also Simulide (open source) with a more limited bunch of microcontrollers which I havent used much but was pretty nice.

Both allow you to attach your MCU to external circuits with Proteus in particularly having a wide range of components you can use. They also have tools for measuring and oscilloscopes, etc.

source
iii@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I haven’t used any myself. To get started with microcontrollers, arduino seems to be the default go-to today.

I’ve found at least two websites portraining to have emulators:

(1) and (2).

source