Affiliate Disclosure

This page explains how this site earns money, which links are affiliate links, and how to tell. It is written to be read, not buried: if a recommendation on picsimlab.com ever earns us a commission, that fact is disclosed here and the links involved follow the rules below.

Some links on this site are affiliate links

Some links on picsimlab.com are affiliate links. When you click one and then buy something from the merchant it leads to, we may earn a commission from that merchant. The price you pay is the same whether you use an affiliate link or go to the merchant directly — the commission is paid by the merchant out of its own margin, not added to your bill.

How to recognise them: the /go/ redirects

Affiliate and referral links on this site are routed through short redirect addresses that begin with /go/ — for example picsimlab.com/go/esp32-devkit/. If a link’s address starts with /go/ and points at a shop, course platform or service (rather than at a PICSimLab download file), treat it as an affiliate or referral link. In the page code these links are also marked rel="nofollow sponsored", the standard machine-readable signal that a link is commercial.

Not every /go/ link is an affiliate link: the download buttons for PICSimLab itself also use /go/ addresses, and those point to the official release files on GitHub. Download links earn us nothing. The /go/ links that are commercial are the ones in recommendation contexts — “from simulation to real hardware” sections, parts lists, buying guides and course recommendations.

What this means for our recommendations

  • We recommend products because they fit the workflow the page is about — typically the real hardware counterpart of a board PICSimLab simulates (an ESP32 DevKit, an Arduino Uno, a Blue Pill, a PICkit programmer), a course that teaches the next step, or a service such as PCB fabrication.
  • Several tools we compare and recommend have no affiliate programme at all — including Proteus, Wokwi and SimulIDE. We cover them on their merits, and our comparison pages say plainly when a competitor is the better choice for a given job.
  • Commissions never buy placement in a comparison table, and we do not publish prices, ratings or specifications we have not checked against the merchant’s or maker’s own pages.
  • Some /go/ links are placeholders that currently point at a merchant’s ordinary home page while an affiliate application is pending; they are marked sponsored from day one so the disclosure is accurate before any commission exists.

Who operates this site

PICSimLab Hub (picsimlab.com) is operated independently by its owner (contact: [email protected]). It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Luis Claudio Gamboa Lopes, the PICSimLab project, Microchip, Arduino, Espressif, or STMicroelectronics. Official PICSimLab downloads are distributed only via GitHub and SourceForge (project ‘picsim’).

How downloads work on this site

Our download pages link primarily to the official PICSimLab release files on GitHub — that is the main channel, and the SHA-256 checksums we publish are the ones from the official release. Where we also list a Terabox copy, it is labelled as an unofficial third-party mirror whose files we have not verified; we always recommend the official GitHub download first and checking the checksum after downloading. We never describe a mirror as official.

Questions

If anything about a link on this site is unclear — whether it is an affiliate link, where it leads, or why a product is recommended — email us at [email protected] and ask. We would rather explain a link than have you guess about it.