Hello, I have been looking for well-maintained open-source projects (as an alternative to proprietary solutions offered by my university) for circuit simulation, and to my understanding KiCad is the largest one, so that is why I came here.
How would I go about simulating this in KiCad (or, as this is already sounding to me rather complex, what is the closest I can get to achieving something like this in KiCad)?
Basically, the end goals are:
Have an (interactive, as opposed to photos of the physical board) digital archive of all the circuits I have built for reference in the future.
When I go on to build it physically, I know it will work without all the hassle of unplugging and plugging wires: we have to cut wires so if we have to move the same wire to a different slot of the breadboard it will either be too long or too short, causing a waste of wires or a spaghetti mess.
What do you want to simulate? There is not much on that “Digilent Protoboard”. There are two 7 segment displays and 4 buttons. And it looks like there are some connectors which interface with the Digilent test equipment.
The schematic itself should just be drawn as any other schematic, with signal flow from left to right, and voltages from top to bottom. Both the buttons and the 7-segment led’s can be symbols from KiCad’s default libraries. For the connectors, you can make some custom connector symbols with the same texts as the signal names on the Digilent breadboard.
You can draw the breadboard in the PCB editor, similar to what BlackCoffee has shown, or keep it a bit simpler with only some outlines on a user layer, and then draw the “vertical 5-hole strips” as regular tracks and only when needed. Then you can either use “cross probing” to quickly find locations between the schematic and breadboard layout (open both the schematic and PCB editors side to side (multi monitor setup is also great for this)
Thank you very much for directing me, as a newbie to electronics the sheer amount of simulation programs available as well as all the different configurations is quite overwhelming!
As a follow-up: I often need to Tune a Circuit by using specific Cap and Resistance (Resistors and/or Pot values) and I use this Circuit… on BreadBoard then, Build and Test it
