Experimenters Circuits

A circuit simulator for learning electricity and electronics. Pick components and instruments, place them in the workspace and connect their terminals with cables. The simulation runs while you build, so the meters and lamps respond to every new connection and every turn of a knob.

WHO IT IS FOR Students studying electricity in school or at university, teachers demonstrating a circuit to a class, and anyone who wants to understand how a circuit works before building a real one.

WHAT YOU CAN DO • Open a ready-made lab — Ohm's law, series and parallel circuits, capacitor charging, resonance, a rectifier, a transistor switch — and change it as you like. • Build circuits from power sources, resistors, capacitors, inductors, transformers, diodes, transistors, lamps, LEDs, switches and fuses. • Measure with an ammeter, voltmeter, wattmeter and oscilloscope. • Operate each instrument with its own controls: turn knobs, flip switches and press buttons. • Slow time down and watch what normally takes a fraction of a second. • Turn off the room light and see the lamps and LEDs glow. • Undo and redo your steps, copy part of a circuit and align everything to a grid.

WHEN SOMETHING GOES WRONG The lab does not stop you from making a mistake. Short a power supply, and it switches itself off. Give a lamp too much voltage, and its filament flashes and burns out. An overloaded fuse blows. A source has internal resistance, a cable has a resistance of its own, and a meter slightly changes the circuit it measures.

GOOD TO KNOW • Save your circuits and open them again later. • No account is needed to build, measure and save. • Remember: working with electricity in real life requires care.

Discovery signals