Recommended Freeware Software for EEs

[LoveLaika]

I was wondering what are the go-to free software for the various fields in electrical engineering? I was thinking about how little I know in respective fields, such as RF and the like, and I thought that perhaps playing around with some software and understanding the concepts can help me better understand it. For instance, LTspice is a good free circuit simulator for analog circuits, and KiCAD is good for PCB design. What do you guys usually go to for the various disciplines in electrical engineering?

[Manul]

From free software I use Elsie (Tonne Software) for filter design and Saturn PCB Toolkit is also very useful.

[rstofer]

When Kirchhoff's equations get out of hand or begin to involve imaginary numbers, I reach for MATLAB or the GNU Octave workalike.  MATLAB costs money, Octave is GNU licensed.

I also use wxMaxima as a general purpose solver - it's also open source.

One way or another, I use gfortran quite a bit.  I use it under WSL Ubuntu on Win 10 machines and natively on Linux machines.

www.symbolab.com has a great online solver and www.desmos.com is really useful for plotting functions.

These are all 'math' tools, not specific to EE.  Still, they are quite useful from time to time.

[rfclown]

I use LTspice quite a bit, but QUCS is amazing for being free. I used ADS every day at Motorola for years. At my present job, we have one ADS license dongle for 10 engineers; I usually use QUCS to avoid the pain.

Free tools that I immediately install on any new PC (not including general purpose utilities):
LTspice
QUCS (similar to ADS)
gerbv (Gerber Viewer)
Saturn_PCB_toolkit
AppCAD
NiVISA and Ni488.2 (while not programs, these free downloads give you the hooks to talk to almost any test equipment)
VirtualBox
PuTTY
CodeBlocks-mingw (for command line c compiler for Windows)
Arduino IDE (mainly to install avr-gcc and avrdude)
Wireshark
IQCreator (because I wrote a program to snag the IQ waveforms)

[rstofer]

And don't forget Python.  It is becoming increasingly important based upon the quality and quantity of the libraries.

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/python-for-electrical-engineers-applications-of-Python-programming-language/

[Benta]

@rstofer:
Thank You for the mention of GNU Octave! That one has flown completely under my radar.
I installed it at once and am now playing around

[rstofer]

A couple of days ago the Peanuts cartoon had an algebra problem.  I initially solved it with a single line in wxMaxima but here the topic is Octave so I rewrote it.  I wind up with 3 lines of code

Code: [Select]

% Peanuts Cartoon
% A man has 20 coins consisting of dimes and quarters
% If the dimes were quarters and the quarters were dimes
% he would have 90 cents more than he has now
% How many dimes and quarters does he have
%
%      1*D + 1*Q       = 20
%     10*D + 25*Q + 90 = 25*D + 10*Q
% or -15*D + 15*Q      = -90
% The matrices look like:
% A = [  1,  1
%      -15, 15]
% B = [ 20
%      -90 ]
       
A=[1,1;-15,15]
B=[20;-90]
A\B

% The result is 13 dimes and 7 quarters
[/font]

I have to wonder how many über geeks spent the morning working on the problem

FWIW, the solution in wxMaxima is simply

Code: [Select]

solve([q+d=20,10*d+25*q+90=10*q+25*d],[q,d])
[/font]