What software do you use for drawing up and simulating circuits on your computer? I’ve tried fritzing, and KiCad and don’t really care for those 2. I’ve used ‘Every circuit’ on my phone and do like that.
Not quite the same level as Fritzing but for home projects using microcontrollers I use Wokwi.com, you can build out small IoT type projects quickly, write the code, and simulate it all online. The important advantage I have found with it is that it makes debugging easier when you haven’t got to worry about the jumper popping out the breadboard 🙂
Simulation Software is something i need to spend the time to really jump into. There is one package that became quite the thing a couple years back when the owners essentially retired it because they were as well. Prior to taht it had been a $5000 package. I believe it’s limited by it’s 32bit environment, (something like that which would take a huge rewrite to fix & make use of faster 64bit CPUs). It’s free but i note that being able to find a downloadable now of it is becoming a bit of an issue & it isn’t being supported now. It’s called Microcap 12.0 Someone else may know it well. I see a fair few tutorials on You Tube around it & it covers vacuum tubes…
LTspice works good for simulation (its free). The free unlicensed version of Autodesk Eagle is good for small projects, but limits the size of board and Number of components. (it’s a lot like KiCad), but there are lot of good youtube tutorials.
Give QSpice a try. From the creator of ltspice and is current and being updated regularly.Â
ltspice for simulating, and altium pcb for pcb designs, I start working with eagle long time ago, I know the programmers of eagle since the beginning, after this changed to rocad, then eagle back again after this to different versions of altium pcb. Also used QC for simualtion, sonnet lite for simualtion of RF circuits and comsol sometimes most for commercial projects. For 3d mainly I use solidworksÂ
KiCad for schema and PCB design.
When in doubt use a microcontroller.