Updated 2024/01/20

Have you ever wanted to symbolically solve simple linear circuits but there hasn’t been a convenient and accessible GUI for you to use? Over the summer of 2022-2023 part of my work as a research assistant involved developing a solution for this problem called lcadide (Figure 1) - a web-based symbolic circuit solver based on the lcapy Python package developed by Professor Michael Hayes of the University of Canterbury.

Figure 1. - Lcadide browser interface.

Lcadide is browser-based to enable easy access to the circuit analysis tool without requiring users to go through potentially complex installation instructions that would vary by operating systems. To do this, lcadide loads and interfaces with lcapy through the tool pyodide (hence the origin of the name lcadide - a portmanteau of lcapy and pyodide). This comes with the trade-off of a consistent slow load-time for lcadide, and some added difficulties in providing certain features.

Currently, lcadide’s development is on some form of hiatus. Recently, I received feedback from a number of students who kindly tested the interface. There are a number of bugs and improvements that they have identified that I intend to catalogue and work on. Some basic functionality is implemented and I have occasionally used lcadide to sanity check results that I have produced by hand. More work is required to take full advantage of lcapy’s power and to provide a useful and intuitive interface for end-users.