Collaborate Disseminate
The original circuit simulation software, called the Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis, or SPICE as it is more commonly known, was originally developed at the University of Califorina Berkeley …read more Continue reading An Open-Source, Free Circuit Simulator
The list of requirements for hosting one of our weekly Hack Chats is pretty short: you’ve got to be knowledgeable, passionate, and above all else, willing to put those two …read more Continue reading Al Williams Tells All in the Logic Simulation Hack Chat
Musicians have a fantastic language to describe signals. A sound can be fat, dark, crunchy, punchy — the list goes on. These aren’t very technical terms, but they get the job done. After all, it’s much easier to ask to guitarist for a crisper sound than to ask them to …read more
Continue reading Rockin’ Out in LTSpice: Simulating Classic Guitar Pedals
Most of us have computers on our desk that would have been considered supercomputers not long ago. We always wonder how many of them get any actual workout other than decoding video. If you want to simulate circuits you may very well start chewing up significant CPU time, so you …read more
Continue reading What Rhymes with Spice and Simulates Huge Circuits?
It’s probably one of the first lessons learned by new drivers: if you see a big, red fire truck parked by the side of the road, don’t run into it. Such a lesson appears not to have been in the Tesla Autopilot’s driver education curriculum, though – a Tesla Model …read more
You’d be hard pressed to find a carpenter who didn’t own a hammer, or a painter that didn’t have a couple of brushes kicking around. Some tools are simply so fundamental to their respective craft that their ownership is essentially a given. The same could be said of the breadboard: …read more
Continue reading The Augmented Reality Breadboard of the Future
Most people who want to simulate logic ICs will use Verilog, VHDL, or System Verilog. Not [hsoft]. He wanted to use Python, and wrote a simple Python framework for doing just that. You can find the code on GitHub, and there is an ASCII video that won’t embed here at Hackaday, but which you can view at ASCIInema.
Below the break we have an example of “constructing” a circuit in Python using ICemu:
dec = SN74HC138()
sr1 = CD74AC164()
sr2 = CD74AC164()
mcu_pin = OutputPin('PB4')
sr1.pin_CP.wire_to(dec.pin_Y0)
sr2.pin_CP.wire_to(dec.pin_Y1)
sr1.pin_DS1.wire_to(mcu_pin)
sr2.pin_DS1.wire_to(mcu_pin)
print(dec.asciiart())
_______
A>|- U +|>Y7
B>|- +|>Y6
C>|- +|>Y5
G2A>|- +|>Y4
Accountants and MBAs use spreadsheets to play “what if” scenarios with business and financial data. Can you do the same thing with electronic circuits? The answer–perhaps not surprisingly–is yes.
Consider this simple common emitter amplifier (I modeled it in PartSim, if you’d like to open it):
In this particular case, there are several key design parameters. The beta of the transistor (current gain) is 220. The amplifier has an overall voltage gain of about 3 (30/10). I say about, because unless the transistor is ideal, it won’t be quite that. The supply voltage (Vcc) is 12 volts and …read more
