[sdiy] Online Power sim tools versus spice ...or TI versus LINEAR

[rsdio at audiobanshee.com]

SPICE (1973, 1975) is literally more than a decade older than the first release of Mac OS (Jan 1984) or Windows (Nov 1985). It really has no user interface at the core - users are required to create the text files for the circuits and models separately from the simulation and analysis. Although SPICE itself is open source, and was ported from Fortran to C in the late eighties, nobody seems to have written a definitive, open source GUI for it. Thus, all of the available programs are really bad at graphics and user interaction.

My impression is that the Windows version is quite lacking, but at least has a longer history. The Mac versions are even more lacking, but I guess we're all getting what we paid for, right?

I really wish someone would write an open-source schematic and model editor for the Mac so that we could finally be done with the bad UI.

The good news is that the expensive, professional circuit design programs can easily tack on the SPICE core code without too much work, and then engineers can use the tools they're already using for schematic capture to feed the simulation. That still leaves SPICE models as a difficult set of files to create.

It seems that it wouldn't be too hard for someone to use the various languages supported by EAGLE to translate a schematic into a SPICE circuit. That might make the process a little less problematic (although EAGLE doesn't comply with Apple's UI design standards, either).

… a quick internet search suggests that I should upgrade my copy of Eagle, because it now supports the FSpice Simulator via PCBSim. Anyone using that?

Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting


On Nov 29, 2015, at 6:03 PM, Michael Zacherl <sdiy-mz01 at blauwurf.info> wrote:
> On 29.Nov 2015, at 12:19 , Ingo Debus <igg.debus at t-online.de> wrote:
>> I attended two seminars with Mike Engelhardt, the creator of LTSpice. He did all the presentations on a Mac, with the genuine Mac version. He said, he does the software development on the Mac version, that's why the Windows version is somewhat behind sometimes. He also said he doesn’t change the Windows version’s user interface to the Mac style because he doesn’t want to annoy all the Windows users ;-) Seems, it is a matter of taste...
> 
> :) that's funny - as others stated, LTSpice is pretty much not compliant to Apple's UI design standards.
> Then again, I don't care. I'm happy not being forced to run X11 to get what I want, like for InkScape for instance, 
> with which I did all of the drawings for my final thesis. That was fun! 
> I'm much more struggling with the Spice paradigm in general - so priorities are shifted a bit anyway. ;)