Who made this

The author

Symbulator and its documentation are the work of Roberto Perez-Franco, begun on 30 March 1999 as an engineering student at the Technological University of Panama.

An early version won first place at the IEEE Student Paper Contest for Latin America in 2000; version 5 was his graduation thesis in 2001. Version 6 came in 2013 at MIT, versions 7 and 8 in 2023 in Melbourne, and this one in 2026.

Acknowledgements

Many people have made Symbulator better over the decades, through their suggestions and their corrections.

Versions 1 to 6 — José Vega (Panama), Tim Hutcheson (USA), Lars Frederiksen (Denmark), Joe Riel (USA), Arne Harstad (Norway), Erwin Baert (Belgium), Charles 'Chuck' Ware (USA), Doug Burkett (USA), Reinhard Willinski (Germany), Kamil Malinski (Austria), Jake Adams (USA), Daniele Martini (Italy), Rozgonyi Szabolcs (Hungary), Michael Rans (UK), Alex Astashyn (Russia), Al Charpentier (USA), Nevin McChesney (USA), Ivan Oro Yu (Panama), Pepe Iborra (Spain) and Dave Conklin (USA).

Versions 7 and 8 — Carlos Perez Ortega (Chile) and Qifan Wang (China).

Version 9 — Antony García (Panama).

My thanks to all of them. I truly am in their debt.

Claude

Porting Symbulator to Python and SymPy, building its interface and websites and rewriting its documentation would not have happened without Anthropic's AI assistant. Claude let me do in two weeks what I had not found time for in two decades.

The software it stands on

Python, with SymPy for the algebra and NumPy for the numerics. My thanks to their creators and maintainers, and it is why Symbulator is free and open-source from 2026.

Answers are checked during development against ahkab, an independent circuit simulator by Giuseppe Venturini.

Licence

MIT, since 2026. Port it anywhere you like, provided the copyright notice and the attribution travel with it.

Getting in touch

The author can be reached at help@symbulator.com