I remember way back in '92 there was a graduate student in electrical engineering I knew took me into a secret back room where he showed me a program that allowed me to basically cut and paste electrical components into a circuit diagram to get a circuit. He must have been really excited about this program, because I was on my way to being an organic chemist and had zero interest in it.
Surfing the dope I found this little game posted by Mangetout and I though about how cool it was. Then I thought that it would be really simple to do something like this with electrical components. I’m not thinking like that computer program the E.E. showed me, I’m thinking more along the lines of one of those fun little kiddie circuit boards with resistors, trasistors and such where you connect everything with wires. The only difference is, since it is only on the computer, you wouldn’t be limited by the number of components given to you and high voltage and alternating current wouldn’t be problematic.
I think it would be really fun to tinker with something like this. Does it exist? Especially for mac, but I have a PC at my disposal too.
I know that freshmen students in my ME program use a program called PSpice in one of the earlier classes (I was a transfer student so I can’t vouch for it’s usefulness). No free ones I’m personally aware of, however.
SPICE seems a bit more complicated than I was thinking, but maybe I can learn how to use it to get it to do what I want. Does it even it have a GUI interface? Even the more complicated thing the E. E. was showing me was all GUI .
There is a free limited trial of PSpice. There is no time limit, but you are limited to something like 40 components. Go here to get the download (16 MB). I have the full version, personally, but I have also used the demo and it’s very good. There’s a lot you can do with it, and, in fact, is probably all the casual hobbyist needs.
LTSpice is woooooonderful. Hundreds of components (and the Linear Technologies catalog for 74 series and such), circuit analysis, blah blah blah. Great for quick-and-dirty mockups before you break out the breadboard (or if time constraints/an impatient boss is an issue, the soldering iron)
Also, a little Google-ing will turn up another cool program called “Circuitmaker 6 Student”. Like LTSpice, but comes with more sample circuits.
I don’t think that anything here has a GUI for schematic entry. Only for waveform viewing. You entry your schematic with net list files. These are text files that say terminal 1 of resistor 5 is connected to node 3.
I don’t think PSpice is really easy to use at all.
I’d recommend National Instrument’s Multisim (formerly Electronics Workbench) for a nice drag & drop design and simulation package.
While LTSpice and Circuitmaker both use SPICE net lists at their core, there is a very easy to use GUI and drag and drop schematic style component placement. To probe a node(s), you pick your reference and test point(s) with a nifty probe tool, and can check out your waveform(s) with another nifty GUI.
I was a computer engineering student and we used PSpice for schematics in electrical engineering courses. I didn’t think there was anything intuitive or easy about it at all. Oh, and netlists suck.
You guys are coming up with stuff that is way too advanced for me. I think I can figure out how do use MacSpice, but what you don’t understand is how little I know about the basic components. I’m no better off than the little kid with a home electronics lab. I googled virtual electronics lab and came up with Crocodile Clips.
But I was even hoping for something simpler than that.
I purchased EW about 8 years ago. I think I paid $150 for it. It was buggy… many times the data reported by the instruments were flat-out wrong. I lost confidence in it.
Spice certainly works. But it’s a struggle to configure all the models correctly. And some models have problems depending on the version of software you’re using.
