Re: gEDA-user: geda cygwin package

[al davis <ad252@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 14 May 2009, Joerg wrote:
> Not bug-for-bug, but as close to the industry standard as
> practical. If you let them use something that has nice
> features they get used to those, and then in industry where
> they don't have those it becomes a problem. You can do just
> about anything with SPICE, even simulate mechanical devices.
> But one has to learn who to "kludge and cajole" SPICE to do
> that.

It's pretty close.  In the development snapshot, and in the next 
official release due  this summer, the whole user interface is 
done by plugins, which can be made any way you want.  Perhaps 
someday it will be bug-for-bug, with more than one, and still 
have extensions if you ask.

Significant parts of industry are moving to Verilog-A.  None of 
the cheap simulators have it, but Gnucap does.  Gnucap also  
accepts Spectre netlists, a subset.

As to those nice features ..  all tools have advantages and 
disadvantages.  There are features you will find in one but not 
another.  Students need to learn this.  So, having nice features 
like Gnucap's interactive operation, extended probes, and the 
ability to easily change circuits interactively or with scripts 
is good.  The ability to directly enter a netlist without file 
baggage is a big help at the beginning.

On the other hand, the tightly integrated graphics of LTspice 
and other PC simulators is in that category where they don't 
really add to functionality, but become a crutch.  Then they 
have a problem when the GUI isn't available, or more importantly 
they have a task that is complicated enough that the GUI gets in 
the way.  Those features are the ones to avoid.

So, it's LTspice that has "nice" features that they would be 
better off without.

I start them with a netlist, then later they learn how to use 
schematic capture as a way to generate a netlist.

> Even a (very) seasoned engineer had to ask about that three
> days ago, how to set abstol and stuff and make it travel with
> the file. Nothing wrong with asking.

Students need to learn that simulators don't always work.  In a 
senior level course on analog design, it is reasonable to expect 
that they will see a convergence failure, and need to mess with 
abstol and stuff.  It might even be desirable for a simulator to 
have a hidden mode that makes convergence worse to make sure 
this happens.

> > 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.
>
> They need to and they do, to some extent. They do not have to
> become programming experts, else I might as well demand that
> all CS guys fully understand Maxwell's equations because we
> have to ;-)

Even the CS guys are not programming experts.  The EE's should 
be able to work with unix, with the command line.  They should 
be able to write programs to solve engineering problems.  They 
should be able to administrate their own systems and write 
scripts to solve their own problems.  They should be able to 
install a program from source, and do some simple porting.

At both universities where I was on the faculty, we got constant 
comments from employers that the students need to learn more 
programming.  We got those comments from accreditation reviewers 
too.  We were not worse than average.  It's a widespread 
problem.

> > 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?
>
> That has IME never been the case, and won't be. None of the
> EEs I know started out CS. And don't believe EE is easy, our
> university had an EE flunk-out rate of around 75% plus. ME
> and EE were the toughest paths there, some of the grueling 4h
> written exams could make grown men shake in their boots.

Typically, the first year curriculum is pretty much the same for 
all science and engineering.  The students usually have not 
really have made up their mind yet.  They made a guess, but 
that's all.  They move around depending on how the first year 
goes.  It amazes me how many have said "I chose EE because I had 
trouble with the programming course and want something else".  
Then they learn too late that EE is hard too.

At a lot of schools, the EE program (and probably others) keeps 
getting easier.  Many older EE professors are having a hard time 
dealing with this.

Don't sell CS short.  It can be pretty grueling too.  We really 
shouldn't be saying that one is harder than the other.

To get back on topic .....  We had cygwin on the lab computers.  
I encouraged students to install it on their own computers if 
they were running windows and didn't also have a unix-type OS 
such as Linux, BSD, or Mac. 



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