ComponentCalc 0.0.0

An Electrical Engineering calculator suite

ComponentCalc: The Electrical Engineering Calculator

Sometimes your TI-89 isn't enough, and an ideal 483.42Ω resistor doesn't exist.

I'm an Electrical Engineer who does a lot of discrete design, which means I can often have ~20 browser tabs open to resources like jansson.us, Analog Devices' dBm Calculator, TI's Designing Gain and Offset in 30s, and my company's part catalog, all just to design a simple active filter.

My goal is to consolidate and enrich these tools into a single program that, above all else, documents and simplifies some design choices like component selection, making circuit designs easy to modify in the future.
You know, for when it takes 8 weeks to get PCBAs back and you realize that an opamp doesn't actually have infinite input impedance.

Planned Features

🔵Core Features
🔷Priority Features
🔹Eventual Features
🔸Possible Features
🔻A bit down the road but I'm tempted

Organization

• 🔵Projects: Stored as directories with human-readable-ish data
  • 🔸Power Rail Configuration: Store available power rails with tolerance, stability, and use preference.
    • 🔻Load Estimation: Use calculators and other contributions to figure out power loads.
• 🔵(sub)Circuits: Organize your calculations within a project!
  • 🔷Reuse: Use a circuit within another circuit (subcircuits)
    • 🔻Dependent Optimization: Optimize two subcircuits to work together, accounting for factors like loading.
• 🔵Try-Then-Commit: Tinker with any value, use it in other circuits, and then choose to change things up.

All Components:

• 🔵Global Part Library: Save characteristics and information about parts to reuse them.
  • 🔵Internal Naming: Add aliases for parts (i.e. Company Part Numbers).
  • 🔹Double Click to Add: See a generic 1kΩ 0402? You'll probably use a lot of those, so it should be easy to add it to your custom library.
• 🔷Project Library: See what parts you're already using in a project (and prefer them).
• 🔻Complex Nonlinearities and Nonidealities: Amplitude dependence, bias dependence, anything that pushes math far out of the S-domain.

Basic Passive Components (RLC)

• 🔵Standardization: Automatic respect of the E-series using eseries for any automatic calculations.
• 🔵Tolerancing
• 🔷Prioritization: Let's keep BOM lines down, if a part's in your project library or global library, let's see if we can make it work.
• 🔷A sense of reality: A 1F SMD capacitor doesn't exist. This won't suggest one.
• 🔹Parasitics: Basic user-defined RLC parasitics.
  • 🔹Estimation: Estimation of standard package (0201, 0402, ...) parasitics.

Other Component Support

• 🔹Ferrite Beads (with parameter extraction)
• 🔹Opamps
• 🔻Diodes
• 🔸Black Box Sources: VCVS, VCCS, CCVS, CCCS
• 🔸Static Subcircuits

Actual Calculators and Utilities

• 🔵Resistor Combination: Parallel / series to hit specific tolerance and/or power rating. Ala jansson.us
• 🔵Capacitor Combination: Parallel / series to hit specific tolerance and/or voltage rating.
• 🔵Inductor Combination: Parallel / series to hit specific tolerance and/or current rating.
• 🔵Opamp Gain/Offset Circuits: I manually use TI's Designing Gain and Offset in 30s far too much (and it usually takes me more than 30s)
  • 🔷Worst-Case Analysis
• 🔷Plot Digitizer: Ala WebPlotDigitizer, but tailored down for datasheet translation (and for sanity during development).
• 🔷Filter Designer: Topologies TBD.
  • 🔹Worst-Case Analysis
  • 🔸Side-by-Side Comparison
• 🔻Custom Metrics: Create your own performance criteria.

Some More Details

Calculation Methods

• (Preferred) Analytical calculation, where reasonable, using SymPy and Lcapy
• Light SPICE simulation using PySpice with an Ngspice backend
  • Limited to Small Signal, Noise, and maybe some AC Large Signal.