We can imagine that this can be used in pre-university education for introducing students to electronics and coding in a virtual low-effort, low-risk and low-cost environment. Many beginners in embedded electronics may find TC as a nice tool for different purposes. TC is free to use (you do need an Autodesk account) and runs directly in your web browser. The simulations have some fun animations and sounds and, every component is nicely depicted. Everything has a very intuitive and visual interface and it’s easy to just dive into it and start tinkering with a circuit. In TC you can hook a wide array of electrical components together, program an Arduino and simulate analog and digital behavior. This is not a review, merely a first impression of TC. TC actually has a lot going for it, and we’ll look at different aspects of it in this blog post.

The Arduino code interface can be viewed further down. A very simple circuit in TC with only a potentiometer and a servo hooked up to an Arduino Uno. Recently, we became aware of something called Tinkercad Circuits (“TC” henceforth), which is more aimed towards electronic circuits and Arduino coding rather than mechanical design, while still keeping the “for-beginners” profile. This is a free CAD-platform for beginners which is very easy to use, but doesn’t have many features. We have written about Tinkercad on our blog before.

Arduino online circuit simulator