Re: gEDA-user: On integrating simulator in gschem

[Ivan Stankovic <pokemon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 10:23:02AM -0500, John Griessen wrote:
> Dave McGuire wrote:
> >On Mar 15, 2010, at 12:32 AM, Dan McMahill wrote:
> >>I spend a *lot* of time looking at simulator output and some of
> >>the things which are used over and over again are easy
> >>interactive zoom in/out, panning at a fixed zoom, putting
> >>cursors on waveforms that will lock onto the actual datapoints,
> >>having delta cursors, and having a flexible and *extensible*
> >>waveform calculator.  The types of postprocessing range from the
> >>very simple (out_plus - out-minus) to more complex but standard
> >>like an fft to fairly complex custom functions.
> >
> >  Good heavens.  That's the sort of stuff I do with a digitizing
> >oscilloscope.  I could never imagine doing that with simulator
> >output.
> >
> >  But perhaps it's just too early in the morning. ;)
> 
> Hmmm....   I've had some coffee, gotten the demo to run some more,
> and it DOES do some of that...  zoom right mouse functions after
> going through a right mouse menu popup and escaping out of that...
> cursors that snap to datapoints is not implemented...yet...

Right, there are many things that need to be done, but at least it's
a start...

What I'd really like to see is a nice integration with gschem and I think the
approach outlined at
http://geda.seul.org/wiki/geda:circuit_simulation_improvements is very
sensible. Imagine having "simulation objects" with attributes that define
simulation type and parameters. Many attributes could be simulator-independent
so we could, in theory, support any simulator just by writing a simple script
that would convert attributes to simulator-specific directives.

The basic idea in lame ASCII art:

          
    gschem     
 (schematic) ----> simulator X ---> output X ----\
      |                                           |---> oscopy
      \----------> simulator Y ---> output Y ----/

                        ....

The simulator output could then be read, displayed and manipulated by oscopy,
which itself is simulator-independent (it's very easy to write a reader for
your favorite simulator output format). Oscopy has an additional advantage in
that it uses numpy so things like doing arithmetic with signals and FFT are
easy to implement.

Within gschem, we could support various simulator-specific flows by having
custom menus that bring up nice GTK dialogs with additional simulator options
etc. The beauty of all this is that most of it doesn't require any changes to
gschem and can be implemented almost entirely via plugins and external scripts.

-- 
Ivan Stankovic, pokemon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Protect your digital freedom and privacy, eliminate DRM, 
learn more at http://www.defectivebydesign.org/what_is_drm";


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