A compact textual format for interchange of electronic circuit designs

Kragen Javier Sitaker, 02020-11-11 (updated 02020-11-26) (1 minute)

Consider 5V-{4n7F-2k2||2.2mH(2%)-npn(B=50)[1k-G]}-G. This describes an analog circuit, kind of a stupid circuit, but a circuit, with five components. In Falstad’s circuit simulator’s save format, such a circuit would take about 190 bytes, but here it takes 42. Moreover you could sort of imagine that such a representation provides a sort of key command interface; it takes me about 20 seconds to type it, and that’s tremendously faster than I think anyone can click through all the stuff in KiCad or Falstad’s simulator or LTSpice to do the same thing.

I think it’s probably worthwhile building something that simultaneously maintains this representation and a 2-D schematic representation.

(For human readability it might be better to say “gnd” rather than “G”.)

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