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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Pretty cool, though I would say that a breadboard is probably a worse UI for capturing circuits than whatever we had in 2003.

But it is fair that e.g. LTspice has a terrible GUI. I always thought QUCS had the best UI of all the free options:

https://qucs.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

Unfortunately it's not the most popular project.

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If you haven't tried micro-cap, I'd recommend checking it out. It became free a few years ago when the company liquidated, and it's orders of magnitude more powerful than LTspice (and quite a bit more intuitive, but still not great). Don't expect any updates though.

3d does present some additional challenges, but we decided to go this route to reduce friction for beginners who might not understand how schematics or other abstract representations map to the real world circuits they're playing with

I'm still not sure what the 3D aspect in particular adds, though. Tools which work with physical wiring diagrams, like Fritzing, have been available for ages, and I don't think the 2D nature of those tools has ever been a meaningful obstacle to understanding.

In my opinion, 3D is useful if:

a) You want to check that your components won't physically bash into something else you care about

b) You are designing something that operates at RF to mm-wave frequencies and need to worry (a lot) about the spatial location of the high-frequency components and nearby conductors / ground planes

c) You want to get an idea about airflow and heat dissipation on power electronics and/or modules (such as power amplifiers) that come with their own heatsinks (some SIPs do!)

Kicad and other bits of more hobby-orientated software that do a 3D render (such as diptrace) tend to do it for reasons (a) and (c). Software that does (b) properly costs hundreds of thousands of €$£ per year to rent and tends to have a UI that makes you scream with frustration at every possible moment.

Those are all good reasons to use 3D capabilities in a more capable tool, but none of them apply here. "Diode" doesn't even check for collisions between parts -- it'll happily let you stick a DIP 555 "inside" another 555, for example -- and it certainly doesn't do any RF or thermal simulation.

i agree, those would be good reasons for 3d

That is literally one of the first things you learn as a beginner.

maybe you should spend your time writing software that teaches the beginners how to read schematics, thus enabling them to make progress toward their presumed goal of understanding and designing circuits, instead of giving them additional handicaps to overcome, such as having to use a user interface that is as confusing as a breadboard (if not more so, if the comments indicating that the pin-1 indicators are missing from the simulated chips are correct; in my browser the app wouldn't even load)

or at least software that gives you an error message when it fails instead of a blank white page

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