I have run across several free pieces of software over the years that I find very useful when working with electronics. Here is a list of a few of them.

This is the second article submitted by BrandonU as part of the “Hobby parts for articles” program. Write something of interest to electronic hobbyist and receive parts for your next project.

Electronics Assistant

This is a great program with a lot of useful tools. It has resistor color codes and capacitor codes, series/parallel calculators, LED series resistor calculator, OHM’s law calculator, power calculator, potential divider calculator, and a Wheatstone bridge calculator. It runs under Windows. [Updated screenshot for version 4.0]

MiscEl

This program has all sorts of calculators in it, including OHM’s law, 3 Phase, Color codes, LEDs, Power supplies, PCB calculations, and many others. It also has some related to weather, geometry, photography and sound. It runs under windows.

CalCOILS

This handy program will help you design your air-wound coils. It runs under windows

Schematic Symbol Reference

Ever run across a schematic symbol you didn’t recognize? This program gives you a picture and description of a lot of common components. It runs under windows

555 Timer Pro

Lots of info and design calculators for the extremely useful 555 timer in this program. Also includes some general electronic info. It is not freeware, but the free trial mode includes a lot of functionality! Runs under windows.

There are also a lot of online calculators free to use on the web. A good selection to start with can be found at http://www.discovercircuits.com/resources/calculators.html.

As long as I am throwing out links, a couple of my favorite places for schematics and design ideas are at the following:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Bill_Bowden/
http://www.discovercircuits.com/list.htm

And a few places for datasheets:
http://www.alldatasheet.com/
http://www.datasheetarchive.com/

Feel free to share your favorite software or links in the comments.
Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 12:46 am and is filed under Development Tools, Electronics Links, Lab Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.