I was looking for an easy to use circuit simulator to simulate a fairly trivial circuit and ran across Qucs:
http://qucs.sourceforge.net/index.html which seems pretty nice. (Runs on Linux, OS X, BSD, Windows; in the Ubuntu repositories.) Instead of the usual procedure of using a schematic capture tool to create a netlist, then processing that through spice, it provides a single GUI front-end where you can both design and analyze the circuit. (If you're working on a big project, this approach is probably counter productive. But more typically you'll want to simulate only a tiny subset of a circuit, and the effort to redraw the schematic is worth the convenience of using a more friendly tool.) It was easy enough going through the DC simulation tutorial, but less obvious how you use it for something a bit more dynamic. I posted a question about that here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/qucs/forums/forum/311050/topic/6388578 It also strangely splits up the component libraries into two sections that are accessed in rather different ways in the UI. I didn't get the point to that and posted about that here (important to be aware of, otherwise you'll be missing lots of components): https://sourceforge.net/projects/qucs/forums/forum/311050/topic/6388561 In other simulator news, a Debian newsletter mentioned Logisim, "an educational tool for designing and simulating digital logic circuits." http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~burch/logisim/ (Qucs will do digital too, though I haven't tried that aspect.) I didn't try this one out, but it looks really close to the logic simulator I used in the late 80's that ran on Macs. This one is cross-platform and written in Java. Like Qucs it is an integrated design and simulation tool. Logic simulators can be a fun way of capturing a bit of the feeling that you actually built something without actually breaking out a breadboard. :-) -Tom _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
