Circuit Idea/In the world of simulations

(This is a personal story written by Circuit-fantasist)

The prerequisites
For a very long time, years, I have refrained from working with programs for simulating electrical and electronic circuits. I thought they would get in the way of my creative thinking. I have preferred to imagine for myself, with the power of my imagination, intuition and practical sense gained through real experiments and practice, the operation of circuits. I have often joked that "my brain is my simulator" :-) My concerns have been that simulators are heavy and clunky, often wrong, and require a lot of expertise to get them to correctly represent the operation of the circuits. So, I thought, I can never be sure of what they show. I have generally thought that simulations are for formal, logical-minded people who are more mathematicians than technicians. I do not know if it was just me or it is generally like that, but I have always been surrounded by such people - smart, knowledgeable... but not understanding. For them, circuits are something existing, as if given to us by God, which only needs to be analyzed through complex mathematical expressions and passed on to students (my observations are from the institution where I studied and then worked). My colleagues used the simulations mostly to give a (pseudo)scientific appearance to their publications, not so much to reveal the secrets of circuits.

How I explored circuits
However, I am a technician and inventor by birth and a teacher by profession (see my creative bio). I visualize the operation of electrical and electronic circuits with my imagination rather than my mind, visualizing the invisible electrical quantities (voltage, current and resistance) on the mental inner "screen" of my imagination. To me, electronic components (diodes, transistors and op-amps) are like living beings. To understand them, I mentally put myself in their place and imagine how they act. When I need to check if it is as I imagined it, I do simple real-world experiments with "tricky" devices and trial setups in the lab. That was until last year...

The change
... but there was a change... I no longer had a laboratory in which to do real experiments, and I could not afford to make a "home laboratory" like I used to have as a hobbyist. It is just that now it was no longer possible to buy appliances and all kinds of elements, to run to the store if I was doing an experiment and at the moment I wanted to change something. And my goal is not to make devices to keep and use... but to experiment with circuits to understand them and tell them on the web.

CircuitLab
At the beginning of the last year, somewhat impulsively and as a joke, I started using the CircuitLab simulator... and I was fascinated - first by its graphical editor, and then by the very simulator. Again I had a "lab" - really not quite real but "simulation"... and it was still a laboratory...

The main advantage of this substitution of the real for the simulated is that experiments become very easy. The elements are large, simplified, easy and intuitive to move, rotate, jump with each other; the diagrams are cleared of details, I stack them like Lego blocks and I am happy like a little child. I do not need very specific and varied elements; I need "conceptual" elements that I can change the properties of. For example, I need a diode with a certain threshold voltage - I do it with an "ideal diode" from the CircuitLab library, to which I set the forward voltage drop in the "parameters" panel. This is actually not just a diode, but a voltage stabilizer. My circuits are conceptual, so the simulator fits them very well. These are "ideal" experiments; they do not end with making a board and a device. The goal here is not to use the device, but to understand the idea and explain it to others. I have worked a bit with some programs like CADSTAR that allow to get to a circuit board. The most complex board I have made with it was an analog I/O controller for a PC. What I dislike about these programs are the detailed circuit diagrams. And to be honest, I really hated making boards. This has not given me pleasure, except in my school years, when I made simple printed circuit boards in a primitive way (painting them with asphalt varnish, etching them with iron trichloride). Later at university there were people around me, colleagues, who found this (and not revealing the circuit ideas) supreme pleasure. I explain it by the fact that I am not a designer, I am not a person who creates devices with the idea of profiting from them. Ideas and philosophy are valuable to me. I am into "ideal" stuff and that is why this simulator suited me so well.

Up until now, I have been making a lot of use of my old resources with lush, hand-drawn color illustrations by posting links to them. But gradually I began to give them up, no matter how good they were. Now I do it with the CircuitLab editor, visualizing the currents sparingly with small, unobtrusive arrows. I have not figured out how to visualize the voltages yet (maybe it will still be with arrows, but in red). One of the great advantages of this way of working is that I get support, confirmation from CircuitLab that my ideas are right, and readers trust me. It is difficult to dispute the numerical and graphical results obtained after the simulations. With this tool, I can arrange my schematics very well. Best of all, I can do step-by-step "scenarios". They are made very easily, "back to front" - I start with the last, most complex scheme, and gradually remove the elements from it; thus I arrive at the first, simplest schematic. Now I feel the greatest pleasure when I sit down to make another such scenario, assemble schematics and experiment. I have not experienced this in a long time, to say never. With real circuits, it becomes difficult and your desire fades gradually. I think the simulator actually does it in the same artificial way that I do the equivalent circuits (man-controlled) of the electronic elements by replacing them with equations. But it happens that sometimes I, like other people, forget about it and start thinking that it is a real circuit. But I have experience and it allows me to work for a long time without touching anything. So I am actually exploiting my practical psychomotor models that I have accumulated from life to be able to continue now with simulation models. Here, this is a very significant difference between me and the "newbies" without practical experience, who only simulate and have not made a real circuit before. It is common knowledge that it is impossible with only simulations until you master the circuits. The right way is first real and then simulation... as it is in life... For example, how does a writer write a book? He does not make real situations, but uses his life experience to see them in his mind and recreate them in writing.

CircuitLab tricks
Because I am an "inventor at heart", I immediately started inventing various clever tricks, which are much easier with the simulator than in reality.

Tuning values
Adjusting values by "feedback", that is, by looking at an indicator, is my idea, which I immediately started to implement. That way, I do not need to calculate, I just "add" the value. Or, as I often like to say, "CircuitLab freed me from the yoke of equations".

Deliberately degraded meters
Normally an "ideal" ammeter has zero resistance, and an "ideal" voltmeter infinitely large. A very clever trick, however, is to deliberately give them some resistance. In this way, not only can we see the effect of their internal resistance on the measurements, but we can also use them as "resistors". This is how we simplify schematics. ... and many others explained in My CircuitLab bag of tricks.