↫Cool Electricity-Related Simulators
Ones I've tried:
- Falstad's simulators: The circuit simulator visualises current flow, which can be very useful when developing intuition. You can also put in interactive switches. Falstad's site also has other simulators and visualisations related to electricity.
- LTSpice: Free SPICE circuit simulator. The UX doesn't follow today's software conventions, but it is a breeze to use once you get used to it.
- Micro Cap 12: Commercial SPICE-like software which recently (2019) stopped receiving updates and went free. Has a wide array of features which make it more suited to some types of analysis than LTSpice, but its user interface is more complicated as well.
- Tinkercad: Hobbyist-oriented online simulator. You can interact with your circuits during the simulation, making this a great tool to prototype simple circuits.
- Wokwi: Similar to Tinkercad. This one doesn't require a sign-in to use and seems useful for trying out display code.
- liveSPICE: SPICE-like circuit simulator that allows for audio inputs and outputs. You can use it to process and output sound in real time! Hearing the signals can be useful both for developing designs and for developing intuition.
- Logisim: Digital logic simulator. Useful but the user interface can be a bit counterintuitive at first.
Ones I haven't tried:
- SimulIDE: An interactive circuit simulator. You can place microcontrollers into your circuits which run your code, like Tinkercad. This one has some different options like PIC and AVR.
- SIMBA: A simulator for power electronics.
- Xic/WRspice: Another now-discontinued and now-free commercial software program, Xic is a graphic layout program for IC design. When the WRspice program is installed alongside Xic, you can start simulations and view their results through Xic. The code repository for these programs and more are available here, if you want to see what goes into making such software.