Hi everyone,

A small team at NI and I have been working for the past few months to create an online circuit design and simulation tool and I'm hoping I can get your opinion and feedback on the tool. We've taken the most commonly used features from our desktop SPICE simulator and put it in a webapp. The hope is to provide engineers and students with a simple, convenient, yet powerful simulator that can be accessed from anywhere on any device. It's touch optimized and has a community where people can share circuits with each other.

We're calling it Multisim Live.

Right now it's in Beta and I've made it free so that we can get as much feedback from you all as possible. You can visit the site at beta.multisim.com and click on the Try Premium button after you register to get all of the features.

Here's an example of a simple current to voltage converter that someone made if you want to try it out right away.

I appreciate any feedback you may have!

-Brian

 

Looks good so far.
I tried the example and it wasn't apparent where the time period of the simulation is controlled, and I didn't readily find that info in the Help file(?).
I noticed when I changed the size of my window the graph and schematic became side by side rather than top and bottom which is not something you normally want. And I couldn't figure out how to change it back to top and bottom.
How many device models do you intend to include in the final version?
Will we be able to use our own Spice models?

I used the old Electronic Workbench for many years before I retired and was generally happy with it.
I especially appreciated being able to control some of the functions, such as a switch, from the keyboard while it was running.

 

I tried the example and it wasn't apparent where the time period of the simulation is controlled

Ah, ok. If you click on the gear icon (settings) and have the schematic selected (just click on it so you don't have the grapher selected) it will come up with simulation settings where you can change the time step and the end time.

I noticed when I changed the size of my window the graph and schematic became side by side rather than top and bottom which is not something you normally want.

We right now change the orientation of the split view based on the dimensions of your browser window. So the assumption is that if you have a skinny long window you would not want to squish your grapher and schematic side by side. Is this something you think would be useful to be able to manually select orientation?

How many device models do you intend to include in the final version?
Will we be able to use our own Spice models?

1. Good question. We don't know. It's a trade off between how much server space we want to devote to devices and which specific devices are needed for a typical user. Right now the plan is to add many more but we plan to pretty regularly release updates so we may feel that we hit a max at some point...or not.
2. That is something that we want to do but I don't know when yet. Would a SPICE block suffice where you can manually type in your SPICE model? Or are you talking more about component creation?

Thanks for the feedback!

 

We right now change the orientation of the split view based on the dimensions of your browser window. So the assumption is that if you have a skinny long window you would not want to squish your grapher and schematic side by side. Is this something you think would be useful to be able to manually select orientation?

Yes, I think it would be good to be able to manually orient as desired.
I, for one, prefer the over/under orientation most of the time.

. That is something that we want to do but I don't know when yet. Would a SPICE block suffice where you can manually type in your SPICE model? Or are you talking more about component creation?

I'm thinking of adding new devices (like other op amp models for example) that could be selected like the built-in models.
Not sure how that would work since the models you have are on your server.
Perhaps some way for the program to access part models that are on my local hard-drive by using the local C-drive directory location as part of the model designation.