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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?"
If booting off a live DVD is OK then you may want to look at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ElectronicLab_Spin .
We had finance apps that students had to use in their coursework. Trying to get them to work on a Win/Linux/Mac system would have been painful and time consuming.
So we created a terminal server environment that let anybody RDP in to use the course apps. That way nobody had to pay for a real version, we paid for the terminal license.
That might work well for you rather than finding an app to support in 3 environments.
Good luck!
My mom says I'm cool.
I don't know if it's been mentioned already or not, but Multisim from National Instruments is a very good software. It's been used by the professors at the school where I work for as long as I can remember.
The game.
Qucs is very capable.
I've used Oregano on Ubuntu with not very many problems. My original reason for trying it out was that the academic demo for OrCAD wouldn't simulate circuits large enough for my projects at school. I've found that it duplicates most of the features we used in courses on OrCAD. Oregano
LTSpice is quite good if you want to design power supplies with Linear Technology components. The component library has just about everything Linear makes, and not much else. So you need some additional libraries for other purposes. You'll probably have to put together a model library for your students, from various downloaded models.
I've had fun with LTSpice. As an exercise, I've been designing hardware to run a Model 15 Teletype (1930s technology) from a USB port. The usual power supply for the 60mA current loop required is a 120VDC supply through a 2K 10W resistor, to get enough punch to energize the 4H 55 ohm selector magnet of the Teletype fast enough. Most of the energy is wasted heating up the big resistor. But I've designed something that up-converts 4.5VDC to 120VDC using an IC intended for photoflash applications, charges up a capacitor when the input is low, and when the input transitions to high (MARK), dumps the energy into the magnet. The 120VDC is only needed for the first 1ms or so of each bit time, to push current through the big inductance. A 3.3V linear regulator then provides the sustain current to keep the magnet pulled in after the cap dumps. The whole thing needs 250mA at 4.5V, which can be taken from a USB port. Separately, a small CPU is needed to do the serial port stuff for the signal.