Re: gEDA-user: Question regarding 1st LTSpice simulation

[Dan McMahill <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

gene wrote:
> Dan McMahill wrote:
>> Robert Butts w
>>
>> BTW, why LTspice and not ng-spice or gnucap which are both open 
>> source?   With either of them, you can avoid tying yourself to a 
>> particular OS, they both have mailing lists with not just users but 
>> program developers, and you have more of an ability to influence the 
>> tools.
>>
>> I've been down the path of closed source software with cheap or zero 
>> cost to obtain before and at the end wished I hadn't.  The particular 
>> nameless tool ended up being a dead end road since I ultimately needed 
>> to migrate to another OS and didn't want to shell out thousands for 
>> something I was using as a hobby.
>>   
> Honestly, I haven't even tried either gnucap nor ng-spice but use 
> ltswitchercad quite a bit.  I'm up for the change, but how's the 
> learning curve?  Anyone care to comment or compare the two?
> 
> gene
> 

I'd comment, but I probably can't give a good measure of the learning 
curve.  From my perspective, if you've used any circuit simulators, 
ngspice and gnucap are both pretty easy.  But then again I first used 
spice nearly 2 decades ago and use circuit simulators daily so most of 
my learning curve memory is pretty distant.  gnucap has some neat 
capabilities like being able to directly get at some internal components 
of device models (junction current vs charging current in a diode for 
example).  gnucap also is quite a bit better than ng-spice for mixed 
mode sims since it was designed for that.  I can't recall though if 
gnucap has small signal noise analysis at the moment.

I'm a fan of learning about netlists and doing the first couple of sims 
by typing in a netlist by hand.  Why?  Because even with expensive 
commercial CAD systems, problems come up where you have to dig into the 
netlist to debug.  Besides, it's one less thing to worry about when 
you're getting started.

-Dan



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