Software and simulators

[ramonest]

Hello, I'm a second year student from industrial electronic and automatic engineering. I like electronics and I'm partially enjoying my university degree.

Lately I've been interested in simulate software and algebraic calculus software.
We're not taught any wt the university. We only used a little but of psim a simulate software initially created to simulate switching supplies converters, etc and that now has evolved a little bit and has more uses (according to my teachers). I managed to learned it quite well as it's not a difficult program (at least that's what I think).

I was interested in learning some other program tools that might be useful in the future. Whether it's for work or useful for myself on my projects. And whether it's for simulating and checking circuits or to solve algebraic problems.

One or two of my favourite books where I try to learn electronics and circuits from, talk about pspice and matlab. I also heard about using python to solve equations, laplace, etc. Are they recommended, used in the industry professionally, worth learning how to use them? Are there better options that should be considered?

During course I don't really have much time left to dedicate to something like that with the work from university and music... so I'd like to decide for 1 or 2 (preferible one simulator and a algebraic/plotter one) and learn it myself during this summer break, since we're not really taught any at my university.

I gladly accept any suggestions/corrections/advise

Sorry if bad English or terms and thanks for your time!

[rstofer]

Matlab can do just about anything.  It often takes a specialty add-on package but that's the nature of the product.

LTSpice is a fantastic simulator for electrical circuits and one electrical circuit is the  ideal op amp integrator.  That means we can simulate an analog computer to solve Ordinary Differential Equations.

Matlab does a better job of analog simulation with their Simulink add-on.  There is a discounted price for non-commercial use and student use.  It's a pretty good deal.  I really like MatLab.

One of the courses I stumbled over in college was Differential Equations.  Now that I have a small analog computer and can simulate a much larger one, these kinds of problems are a lot more fun.

Linux ha some kind of equation solver as well.  Right off, I can't remember the name.

[danadak]

Linux sim is QUCS.                      http://qucs.sourceforge.net/

TI has Tina for download free.     http://www.ti.com/tool/tina-ti

Regards, Dana.

[Wilksey]

I keep hearing people mention "Octave" - might be worth checking out?

[amspire]

I keep hearing people mention "Octave" - might be worth checking out?

Octave is a pretty good MatLab replacement. Also look at SciLab and Maxima. If you want an open source Mathcad-type replacement, you can try SMath. Mathcad and Smath have the advantage that it chase  worksheet format that looks like proper mathematical documentation. SMath have an online version, so you do not even have to install it:

http://smath.info/cloud/