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Re: Integrated Simulator

 

I had spoken with ngspice devs and they have suggested me a workaround
for the bug. Unfortunately, it requires a patch that is currently not
included in the release version, so we resort to building from the
source again.

To ease the pain, I have updated get_libngspice_so.sh [1]. Now it should
build the correct library version for Linux, Windows (mingw64) & OS X. I
have managed to run the script successfully on all the mentioned
platforms, but I still do not have KiCad compiled on OS X, so I was not
able to test it there.

I have updated the ngspice branch in my github repository [2]:
- applied fixes for Win7 & OS X (thank you Jean-Pierre & Johannes)
- resized dialogs, so all the fields are visible and windows fit 1024x768
- fixed a few minor bugs
- corrected demo circuits
- cleared, formatted & documented the code
 & added some documentation
I consider the code ready for merge. If there are no objections, I would
like to proceed next week.

Regards,
Orson

1. https://orson.net.pl/pub/libngspice/get_libngspice_so.sh
2. https://github.com/orsonmmz/kicad-source-mirror/tree/ngspice

On 07/21/2016 11:16 PM, Chris Pavlina wrote:
> Really, really nice! I made it do a thing! https://misc.c4757p.com/kicad_sim.png
> 
> I feel bad to provide a bug report on my very first communcation on
> this, but... found one: not sure if this sort of thing is actually
> standard SPICE or an LTspice extension, but I tried parameterizing a
> component value, setting a resistor's value to {R} - that sort of thing
> leads to irrecoverable lockups here.
> 
> On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 09:37:57PM +0200, Tomasz Wlostowski wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> As some of you have noticed, we've been working on a "secret" feature
>> during the hackathon at CERN. The feature we're talking about is an
>> integrated circuit simulator. Currently it features:
>> - Seamless integration into schematic editor,
>> - AC/Transient/DC sweep simulations,
>> - Voltage probing from the schematics,
>> - Live tuning of component values.
>>
>> A video demonstrating the capabilities of the new simulator is available
>> on Tom's YouTube channel [1].
>>
>> The code is currently available in the ngspice branch on Tom's GitHub
>> [2] for review & testing. It's a big feature, so we didn't want to push
>> it immediately to the product branch. We'll greatly appreciate your
>> feedback!
>>
>> The simulator uses ngspice [3] as the Spice kernel. We'd like to thank
>> ngspice developers for providing a DLL interface which made seamless
>> integration of ngspice into Kicad possible.
>>
>> In order to get started:
>> - install ngspice shared library (is not provided by many Linux distros,
>> Arch Linux is a known exception, so you might have to compile it from
>> the sources with --with-ngshared --enable-xspice options).  Windows
>> DLLs, msys2 PKGBUILD & binary packages (to be included soon in
>> the official msys2 repo, currently merged to
>> https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages/) & Linux script to build the
>> library are available at [4].
>> - compile eeschema with -DKICAD_SPICE=ON option,
>> - have a look at some examples in demos/simulation directory.
>>
>> Happy simulating,
>> Tom
>>
>> [1] https://youtu.be/A2_-hdRcf4U
>> [2] https://github.com/twlostow/kicad-dev/tree/ngspice
>> [3] http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/
>> [4] https://orson.net.pl/pub/libngspice
>>
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