Re: gEDA-user: geda cygwin package

[al davis <ad252@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 14 May 2009, Joerg wrote:
> AFAIK Gnucap is not quite SPICE-compatible, but that's what
> your students will be facing when they head out into
> industry. LTSpice might be an alternative. Very short
> learning curve, free of cost, nice graphics output and by now
> very widespread in industry.

It depends which spice.  Strictly, SPICE is not SPICE 
compatible, because if you move to a different one something 
will be different.

I get  the impression that what you want is bug-for-bug 
compatibility.  From a beginners perspective, the important 
differences between Gnucap and any particular Spice are usually 
that Gnucap has extra capability that the Spice doesn't have, 
and this extra capability is useful to a beginner.

From the viewpoint of undergraduate education, it is as close as 
any, and provides an experience closer to the high-end 
simulators than the PC spice's do.  It has a shorter learning 
curve that the real Spice from Berkeley, and a smoother learning 
curve than the graphic commercial and cover-crop spice's.  The 
popular graphic PC spice's carry you part way in luxury, then 
dump you when you really need it.

The PC graphic spice's only provide a short learning curve if 
you already are comfortable with the typical project baggage.  
Then if you want to play, to do more than what you can do with a 
few kick buttons, you need to start over.

Educators typically use simulators very poorly, as if they 
themselves don't understand.  In most cases, the total use is a 
few specified runs with a couple of graphs, that you do after 
everything else is done.  A more appropriate use of simulators 
is to explore things that you can't see with real measurements.  
There is a lot that you can find out about a circuit that you 
can't measure in a practical way.

Students need to learn to be flexible, and they need to learn to 
use computers effectively, not just by kicking the GUI a few 
times.  EE's, even analog designers, need to learn some serious 
programming.

Too many schools don't do this.  In the extreme case, EE could 
become a dumping ground for students who can't make it in CS.
Is that what you want?



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