July 25, 2026
Shock drama at the tiniest scale
Show HN: I made some transistor animations
Tiny transistor videos have viewers stunned, nostalgic, and begging for more
TLDR: A creator visualized the hidden motion inside transistors, turning an intimidating electronics concept into something people could actually watch and understand. Commenters were split between amazement, nitpicking the realism, and joking that they were entertained even when they had no clue what they were seeing.
A maker dropped a set of transistor animations showing the tiny charged particles inside common computer parts, and the comments instantly turned into a mix of mind blown, finally I get it, and wait, is this actually realistic? For anyone who doesn’t spend their life thinking about electronics, the big deal is simple: these clips try to show what’s happening inside the microscopic switches that help run basically every device you own. Blue and red dots zip around, little white flashes pop when particles cancel each other out, and suddenly a topic that usually lives in terrifying textbooks looks weirdly watchable.
The loudest reaction was pure praise. One commenter said it was among the coolest diagrams they’d ever seen and far better than the classic university nightmare of “whiteboards with scribbles and arrows all over it.” Another admitted they had formal electrical engineering training and still never fully got what was happening inside one transistor type until now. That’s the kind of comment every explainer dreams of.
But of course, the crowd also delivered some deliciously nerdy side-eye. One person questioned whether the motion looked too slow and wondered if bigger, more powerful versions would behave differently, basically launching the thread’s mini realism debate. Another came in with lovable chaos energy: they confessed to learning almost nothing, yet enjoying every second anyway. And because the internet can never leave well enough alone, someone immediately asked the obvious sequel bait: can we get this in 3D?
Key Points
- •The article presents transistor animations generated with a semiconductor simulator.
- •Blue dots represent electrons, red dots represent holes, and white flashes indicate recombination events.
- •The first animation set shows NPN BJT, n-channel MOSFET, and n-channel JFET using carrier velocity derived from combined diffusion and drift currents, without explicitly showing diffusion.
- •The second set depicts carrier motion with both diffusion and drift and is described as the most accurate representation, though visually more confusing.
- •The final set adds current and voltage displays at each terminal for the same three transistor types.