Electronics > Beginners

Good electronics simulator for beginner?

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Audioguru:
Hi Zero. Why didn't you change your avatar to Zorro999? :-DD

Mr. Scram:

--- Quote from: Zero999 on January 05, 2019, 11:20:52 pm ---Real-time simulators are optimised for speed and not much else.

LTSpice is optimised for accuracy and is designed to be flexible and give repeatable results.

The requirements for real time simulators and more professional ones such as LTSpice are conflicting. It's not possible to make a real-time simulator as accurate and repeatable as LTSpice. Take a simple circuit with a push-button switch for example. In a real time simulator, the user will click on the switch component, to get the circuit to respond. In LTSpice, the user would implement it as a time controlled resistor, a voltage, or current controlled switch, with set on/off and rise/fall times. The interactive approach of the real-time simulator may seem easy and intuitive, but it's not as repeatable as the LTSpice approach, because it relies on user input, which is non-repeatable.

--- End quote ---
I don't really see anything which can't be solved. You can make real-time simulators repeatable by adding keyframes or something similar. The biggest problem seems to be none are actually aiming to be accurate, which is understandable as it's a big step up from just being sort of similar.

TheUnnamedNewbie:
I'm sorry, but what even is a real-time simulator?

I also started out with LTSpice but I hate it. I would suggest one of the more intuitive tools online for a beginner. Sure, it is not as powerful and accurate as a SPICE engine, but you don't need ultra-high accuracy for what most beginners are doing. You are a beginner, not a professional. You don't 'need' professional tools. Sure, the online ones are not professional, but they work and are fast to learn! (oh and LTSpice is not really a 'professional' tool either)

SPICE is a bit clumsy - it can take a lot of 'setup' to do simple simulations. They are engineering tools after all. I use SPICE very often in my work, but it requires you to set up rigorous 'experiments' and spend time creating output graphs of stuff - all of which is fine if you are going to spend many $ on CMOS tapeouts and it has to be perfect.

An advantage of SPICE is that you can import netlists, so you can export the netlist from your PCB software (Altium, KiCAD, orCAD, etc) and then simulate that circuit. Takes some work to do library-wise, but can be beneficial to set it up if you do a lot of analog design with PCBs (ofcourse, Altium and Allegro and xpedition all have this stuff built in).


--- Quote from: Mr. Scram on January 05, 2019, 08:49:27 pm ---
--- Quote from: Zero999 on January 05, 2019, 08:44:54 pm ---I agree that real time simulation can be beneficial for beginners, but woudn't recommend using it much beyond educational purposes.

The problem with any simulator is knowing its limitations.



--- End quote ---
Agreed. Part of the issue seems to be that LTSpice was developed a while ago now, while these real-time simulators are more modern. The latter also seem to be less mature and more frivolous, sometimes omitting quite a bit of detail. It seems likely that they'll sooner or later mature, or that LTSpice or a successor evolve to include these more modern features. It's undeniable that LTSpice and compatible simulators are well supported by various manufacturers with all kinds of components being available, which is part of their value and why they endure.

--- End quote ---

LTSpice is not the best example of an actual SPICE engine though. I always thought of it as a simple almost 'toy'-like simulator. It can do what, like 3 simulation types? Op, AC, transient? I don't know of any professional that uses it. Everyone professional I work with uses hspice, pspice, ELDO, Spectre(or SpectreRF) or GoldenGate. The reason there is industry support for LTSpice is not because of LTSpice, but because of the other SPICE engines, and LTSPICE just happens to be able to work with those models (since those are standardized).

DC1MC:
Since I didn't see mentioned here, what about Qucs:
http://qucs.sourceforge.net/download.html

It's reasonable simple to use.

 Cheers,
 DC1MC

exe:
I used to use TINA-TI a lot. I like it more than LTSpice as it lets seeing plots from previous simulations. It seems to be dead now. I don't like ltspice UI (for many reasons), so I was looking for other simulators, but I'm on Linux, so my choice is limited. I think I tried pretty much everything worth trying, including paid software.

My choice would be TINA if they had better pricing. I tried their cloud-based version. It was cheap (I think below $20 per year), but buggy and slow. So, don't recommend (unless they improved it, I tested it two years ago or so). TINA 10+ also got many new features beyond simulation, like pcb design etc, they were unusable when I was testing. Also some Linux-related problems (although they don't officially support Linux).

QUCS didn't work for transient response analysis. There was a fork attempting to fix it, not sure if it's still alive and/or changes were merged back into original QUCS. UI is also non-intuitive, but that's a problem with most simulators. At least some knowledge about SPICE is needed (that's true about many other simulators too).

There used to be a free version of pspice, dut I wasn't able to get it running on Linux.

https://www.falstad.com/circuit/ is a good choice for very small circuits, I use it sometimes. Afaik, it's open-source and it's possible to download it and run localy, if needed.

There are other "cloud"-based simulators. I tried them all a couple of years ago, none made me happy. Some had horrible UI, some had ridiculous limitations and paid subscriptions, most of the don't let exporting design (imho). May be things are different now, Idunno.

So, what I'm using now? Ltspice, it runs smoothly on Linux. Usability is questionable, learning curve is steep, range of available components is limited to what the developing company sells on the market, but I don't see an alternative for Linux users.

Anyway, no matter what simulator is chosen, there is a learning curve. And don't blindly rely on any of them as they are as accurate as underlying models are. Also, keep in mind most simulators don't warn you when exceeding absolute maximum ratings, temperature, etc. There are many other aspects to keep in mind (ambient temperature, self-heating, tolerances, parasitic effects, etc) when using simulators.

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