kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Andy Peters <devel@xxxxxxxxx>]

> On Aug 9, 2018, at 12:06 PM, Maciej Suminski <maciej.suminski@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> Hi Andy,
> 
> On 08/09/2018 02:12 AM, Andy Peters wrote:
>> 
>>> On Mar 26, 2018, at 4:30 AM, Maciej Sumiński <maciej.suminski@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Would someone running nightlies on macOS test the Spice simulator? In
>>> particular, please simulate demos/simulation/sallen_key from our bundled
>>> demos and see if you get warnings "Unknown model type spice2poly -
>>> ignored". Testing both a self-built nightly and our official package [1]
>>> would be greatly appreciated.
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> Orson
>> 
>> 
>> The Sallen-Key demo circuit simulates as expected with the 5.0 release on macOS High Sierra.
> 
> Thank you for reporting back!
> 
>> One silly question: is there, or will there be, a standard location for Kicad to find SPICE models and libraries? The demo project has the model library (and the library for the op-amp symbol) in the project directory.
> 
> There are no standard paths for any library kind and Spice libraries are
> no exception. Are you asking for a dedicated environmental variable to
> set the Spice model path?

You’re right, I am asking for an environment variable that points to the models, in much the same way as the environmental variable for a 3D models path works.

I started to think about adding fields for Spice models to some component symbols, and then quickly realized that that can get ugly. For starters, footprint pin numbers and subckt pin assignments won’t match for most things. Then it became obvious that I need a separate library or libraries for symbols used for Spice. And that’s when I thought about where the models should live. In the same directory as the libraries?

-a