Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.

Thursday, March 16, 2023 at 14:19

SimulIDE - The Free Electronic Workbench Software

Simulide is a free/open source electronic workbench software, that is, a real-time circuit simulator with PIC, AVR and Arduino simulation. It is suitable for hobbyist and student in electronic engineering. It is available for GNU/Linux, Windows (32-bit and 64-bit) and MacOS. It reached version 1.0.0 release candidate III on Wednesday, 12 October 2022. Here at Ubuntu Buzz we want to convey the message to all to try, use and, if you can, join the development. Happy studying!

Subscribe to UbuntuBuzz Telegram Channel to get article updates.

About Simulide

SimulIDE is a simple real time electronic circuit simulator, intended for hobbyist or students to learn and experiment with simple electronic circuits and microcontrollers, supporting PIC, AVR and Arduino. It is a free/open source software licensed under GNU GPLv3 or later. Its first version 0.0.1 was released 2015 and its Launchpad code forge was registered 2012. The author claims it is not very accurate for circuit analysis and limited in features. However, it is fast, simple and easy to use. It is now still under a growing development and everyone is invited to get involved together. Its website is located at https://www.simulide.com.

Features

Graphical user interface (GUI).
Pre-built templates or examples.
Analog and Digital components.
Microcontrollers.
Code Editor.
Debugger.
Subcircuits.
DIP/Logic Symbols.
Circuit Animation.
Basic Shapes.
Oscilloscope.
Signal Plotter
Serial Port Connection.
Serial Monitor.

Similar Software

Electronic Workbench *
ISIS Proteus *
Multisim *
gEDA
KiCAD
LibreCAD (no simulation)
Qucs
NGSpice

*) Proprietary software, not a free/open source software.

Community Reception

Projects made in Simulide. (Simulide Forum Community, 2021-2022)

Al Williams says "I recently found an open source project called Simulide that has a few issues but does a credible job of mixed simulation." (Hackaday, 2018)

Patrick Fitzgerald who wrote eight Simulide tutorials says in one article "We can setup SimulIDE to program our Uno with Arduino IDE sketches or AVRA Assembler .asm." (HacksterIO, 2023)

Pascal Cotret a PhD in embedded systems security says "if you need something like a real-time monitor, right click on the Arduino and select Open MCU Monitor. You’ll be able to check register contents in real-time when the simulation is running !" (PCotret, 2023)

(Waveform Generation 16-bit with Keyboard by Defran)

We think Simulide is still a new thing to many and that's why we rarely find anyone writes about it online except in the Forum. You will find many people share their projects you can open, study and edit in Simulide there. However, we managed to find some independent authors who wrote things about Simulide outside the forum above. See also academic researches below as Simulide for years has been used in many electronics research.

Academic Researches

Simulation of Low-Frequency Sine Wave Generator with DDS Method Based on Arduino Uno using SimulIDE Simulator (2022, DOI), SimulIDE is used as a simulator software to simulate electronic hardware, an Arduino Uno microcontroller, and Oscilloscope.

A Digital Twin Simulation Platform for Multi-rotor UAV (2020, DOI), Unity, ROS, Matlab and SimulIDE are combined to implement a novel digital twin simulation platform for multi-rotor UA.

Simulide is not an unknown electronic software to academic people. We can easily find several IEEE papers that using it in the research. Some use Simulide for their thesis or dissertation. There are a lot more in the last link above compiled by the forum community.

Download

Visit Download Page at simulide.com/p/downloads.html.

(The download page)

On Ubuntu, visit the Download Page and download the "Linux 64" version. This will navigate you to an online shop for software called Gum Road (please note that selling free software is OK and it does not violate software freedom) where you can input any price even zero and get the download link via email.

On Windows, download the Windows 32 or 64 bit version. This will also redirect you to Gum Road shop.

On MacOS, download the MacOS version. This will also redirect you to Gum Road.

How To Install

On Ubuntu, extract the compressed archive file -> a folder named Simulide will be created -> open Simulide folder -> double-click the Simulide executable file -> Simulide runs -> if it does not run, please give 'executable' properties to the file and repeat.

On Windows, install the executable file as any normal application.

On macOS, install the image file as any normal application.

How To Use

Run Simulide -> go to File explorer (to left) -> Examples -> Micro -> Arduino -> Oscope -> double-click the file oscope8544.sim -> circuit simulation will show with an osilloscope -> click Power Circuit (to top) -> simulation runs -> you are exercising one example. Feel free to try another examples as you wish. This is one of the easiest ways to try out Simulide.

Simulide provides official user guide in their website.

(Simulide showing an Arduino pre-built example simulation circuit and code. Notice that the osilloscope is detached out of the curcuit in a new window.)

How To Contribute

Simulide is a community project and funded by donation. As we mentioned above, it is still in a growing development today and everyone is welcome to help with the project. If you can help Simulide, you may consider sending donation via Contribution webpage. If you can help by programming and others, feel free to visit the same page. Happy hacking!

****