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Cheap, Cross-Platform Electronic Circuit Simulation Software?
dv82 writes "I teach circuits and electronics at the undergraduate level, and have been using the free student demo version of OrCad for schematic capture and simulation because (a) it comes with the textbook and (b) it's powerful enough for the job. Unfortunately OrCad runs only under Windows, and students increasingly are switching to Mac (and some Linux netbooks). Wine and its variants will not run OrCad, and I don't wish to require students to purchase Windows and run with a VM. The only production-quality cross-platform CAD tool I have found so far is McCad, but its demo version is so limited in total allowed nets that it can't even run a basic opamp circuit with a realistic 741 opamp model. gEDA is friendly to everything BUT Windows, and is nowhere near as refined as OrCad. I would like students to be able to run the software on their laptops without a network connection, which eliminates more options. Any suggestions?"
The law is never plain and simple.
I use KiCAD and it works quite well for designing PCBs, though it has some rough edges.
However, the discussion is about circuit simulation in college, which has nothing to do with PCB design. KiCAD doesn't currently integrate with Spice unfortunately, though that would be really nice. I don't actually know of any open-source stuff that does Spice well. The SPICE engines themselves are open-source (such as ng-spice), but they have no front-end at all, so you have to do everything at the command line, which is really rather clunky when you want to, say, look at graphs of simulation results.
When I want to simulate a simple circuit (not often), I start up a Windows computer and run an old version of Pspice (9.something) which is freely downloadable. The state of circuit simulation on Linux is very, very bad right now.
I would say that it these students are in an engineering or science program, they must know how to use these tools, just like someone in a science/math program must know how to use Mathematica. That said, if the course in question is just a survey course, the specific tools may be less important than the exposure. For this there may be alternatives. For instance, an only breadboard simulator is available. Google circuit simulators and there may be more available. I am not sure what is available for CAD.
Here is another issue. If the class teaches the design techniques and not the application, the maybe students can use whatever they want. What distresses me is that we are no longer teaching the high level concepts, but the mouse based menu selection. Instead of teaching the concept of cut and paste, we are teaching the menu commands. The problem is when the menu changes, the students are SOL. For career training, this is fine, but I think we should be teaching at a higher level for college. For instance, in my college, we were just told to write a program to solve the problem or create a simulation. How we did it using the available tools were up to us.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
You sir, are an idiot, or at least the company you work for is.
The last thing you should care about is what brand of software someone
used to learn engineering. This is tantamount to a building contractor
only hiring framers who use "Stanley model 13 hammers".
You should be trying to determine if a candidate actually knows how to
design and solve problems; not worry about what tools they used.
Of course I realize this is how industry operates. The depths of human
stupidity never cease to amaze and amuse, and sadden too, sigh.