Re: gEDA: SPICE GUI

[MSWaters <M.Waters@bom.gov.au>]

Stuart,

As you say gspiceui is a GUI interface for the SPICE command line.
I am not planning for it to be a stand alone application rather to interface
with the good work others have already done ie. gschem, gnetlist, gnu-cap,
ng-spice and gwave. Hopefully at some stage in the future an interface to
gschem will be possible such that the sort of functionality provided by
LTSpice will be implemented. Ie. defining and inserting probes directly
into the circuit schematic and then running a simulation. At this point there
is almost 0.5Mbyte of sources and I'm only about half way to version 1.0.

I'll implement your suggestion re using -v in the gentlist argument list now.
My intention is for all the output (particularly errors) from all processes 
run by gspiceui to go to the console tab however this behaviour may not work 
properly yet. It will be fixed.

The idea of importing multiple .sch files hadn't even occured to me so I'll 
add it to the wish-list and see what can be done. Could you send me a design
made up of more than one file so I can do some testing?

I haven't done anything to GNU-Cap, it was compiled and installed according to 
the instruction provided. When you create a simulation using gspiceui it 
stores it in a file like: test-amp1.gnucap.sim. The SPICE commands for 
GNU-Cap to execute are appended to the end of this file. The simulation file 
is given to GNU-Cap and run in batch mode as is. The actual commend used to 
envoke GNU-Cap appears in the console tab.

I'm currently working on the interface to NG-Spice. It's been quite a complex
process developing a mechanism to create simulations based on GNU-Cap
and NG-Spice but it is largely done. The panel classes for AC and Transient
have been created but are not yet complete. Hopefully I'll be able to expose
more of the NG-Spice interface in the near future.

On the topic of NG-Spice, I.ve found a quick and dirty way of converting the
info documentation into HTML so I can view it in a Web browser. There's a
utility called gnome-info2html2 that comes with Redhat 7.3 that does the job.
It doesn't seem to come with Redhat 9 but there is a utility called texi2html
that might be of some use. Maybe you could add it to the NG-Spice 
documentation.

Mike

On Saturday 07 August 2004 10:54, Stuart Brorson wrote:
> 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