Re: gEDA: SPICE GUI

[sdb@cloud9.net (Stuart Brorson)]

Hi Guys --

A few observations about gspicegui.

*  I downloaded and compiled the program.  After fixing the bug noted
by others, I ran it successfully.   Mike, Very cool effort!  Thank you
for writing this!  I'm sure it will be used with great frequency!
It's also a very nice way to introduce yourself to us gEDA users!

*  The bugfix I used was to comment out the function declaration for
bImportSchem in FrmMain.cpp like this:

// bool  FrmMain::bImportSchem( const char * psFileName=NULL )
bool  FrmMain::bImportSchem( const char * psFileName)

With this fix, the code compiled cleanly on my Fedora 1 system (gcc
3.3.2)

*  As it stands, the program is not a GUI replacement for PSpice or
LTSpice.  (In those programs, you are presented teh schematic & can
edit it as well as add voltage probes.)  Rather, it provides a GUI
replacement for the SPICE command line for those folks who can't
remember the SPICE command syntax.  You're supposed to use gschem to
draw your schematic first, and then just read it in using gspicegui. 

Mike, are you going to evolve towards an LTSpice-like program, or is
the program meant as a CLI replacement/frontend for SPICE?   


*  With gspicegui, you can either import a pre-existing SPICE netlist
(.ckt), or you can import a gschem .sch file.  If you read a .sch
file, gspicegui invokes gnetlist -g spice-sdb on the input file.  It's
nice to see my work propagated!  Some notes for Mike:

--  Please consider using "gnetlist -v -g spice-sdb".  This provides
verbose output during netlisting, which is useful for debugging
problems.  Gspicegui worked fine on your sch, but when I tried it on
one of my larger designs, it died & didn't tell me why.

--  Also, please consider modifying the .sch file selection widget to
support shift and cntrl keys so that you can select multiple .sch
files at once.  This is useful for larger designs (which some of mine
are).  

I suppose I could supply a patch to implement these featurelets, but
I'm knee deep in gattrib right now. . . . . .

*  I was able to run gnucap on one of my netlists with non-numeric
netnames using gspicegui.  When I run gnucap from teh command line on
the same file, it barfs after complaining  about every line.  Did you
do something to fix gnucap?  Or have I mis-installed gnucap?

*  Any reason why integration with ngspice is incomplete?  Is there
something whcih we ngspice hackers could do to improve integration?

Again, great work!!  Thanks!

Stuart