Forums » CircuitLab Feature Requests

Just LOVE CircuitLab. Most of the courses taught in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at North Dakota State University are switching over to using CircuitLab for lectures, homework assignments, and pre-lab work. I've been teaching 30+ years and CircuitLab is the best circuit simulator I've seen.

If two blocks were added under Voltage Signal Elements, I'd use CircuitLab instead of Simulink (or VisSim) in my controls classes as well. What's needed are:

• Random signal generator: Instead of a step voltage source, output gaussian noise with a mean of zero, variance of one. (Many simulators approximate this with the sum of twelve uniform random variables minus six.)

• Discrete-Time H(z) block: Instead of implementing a differential equation H(s), implement a difference equation, H(z), with the sampling rate specified by the user.

• Time Delay: Delay a signal by X seconds.

• Clipping Block (not needed: you can do that with an op-amp, but nice to have): Clip a voltage at Vmin and Vmax.

• Quantization Block: Round the voltage to multiplies of 50mV (example) to simulate an A/D converter. (also not necessary but nice to have).

Given these blocks you pretty much have a replacement for SimuLink or VisSim. Better price too.