New to the list, a few questions


To ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
From Daniel Robert Franklin <daniel@ieee.uow.edu.au>
Date Wed, 4 Aug 1999 16:17:57 +1000 (EST)
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Reply-To ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it

Hi,

I'm a PhD student in Electrical Engineering at the University of Wollongong,
Australia. I recently heard about this project, it sounds great - a good
solid electronics simulator is sorely needed in Linux.

I have a few questions regarding the current development effort:

1) Is there a web page tracking the progress of this work?
2) Is there a FAQ somewhere? If not, then I would like to ask:
3) What are the main objectives? I know there are a few shortcomings
in standard Berkeley SPICE in terms of accuracy etc. In addition, I have
personally found that

* The command line interface is not overly intuitive. Does
ng-spice use Readline? IIRC there is a patch to 3f4/5 to add this feature...

* The on-line help system could be a lot better. I have found the help
browser to be very flakey and very counter-intuitive. The use of the Athena
Widgets seems to be a large part of this problem. I far prefer the way
Octave handles its online help, and this does not depend on X windows.

* Graphical output is a bit basic - I think there is a lot of scope for
enhancing this. Octave's use of Gnuplot is smart, since it already exists
and is pretty ubiquitous, and it works well. I think Gnuplot will interface
fairly easily to other programs.

* PSpice compatibility - it seems that most people use PSpice, and virtually
all undergraduate textbooks use PSpice as their reference... whether right
or wrong, it seems to be the dominant platform. Is there any plan to add
PSpice-compatibility so that PSpice models and circuits can be used more
easily with ng-spice?

* A GUI front-end a la PSpice (possibly in conjunction with the gEDA
project?) would be very nice. This would greatly improve the accessability
of the system for the more casual user, and should not be too difficult to
implement.

- Daniel

--
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*       Daniel Franklin - Postgraduate student in Electrical Engineering
*       d.franklin@computer.org
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