Re: gEDA-dev: GSoC idea: improving the gspiceui frontend

[al davis <ad151@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 18 January 2008, Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan wrote:
> Was poking around with LTSpice yesterday on my work windows
> machine. It will be great to have a well integrated
> frontend/plot tool for ngspice/gnucap. LTSpice does a fairly
> good job of integrating all the analysis tools  like
> plotting, poking around with probes, taking FFT of the
> plotted values.
>
> All these pieces already exist in the Free World. We need not
> have a schematic editor, but something like xgshem2spice or
> something like that (in the lines of xschem2pcb) which will
> integrate the schematics, a front end like gspiceui and
> perhaps a good plotting tool like labplot which can plot the
> data or take FFT of a selected area, zoom into it and so on,
> will be a a nice addition to gEDA. Perhaps this can be one of
> the next GSoC projects ? Just a thought to ponder..

I agree that there is room for improvement in this area, but I 
don't want an integrated GUI and plotter.

I strongly believe that a graphic front-end and a post-processor 
must be separate tools.  

Graphic front-ends limit functionality too much.  I would rather 
type the commands directly.  To do the subset that a GUI could 
provide, there are only a few of them.  I suppose beginners 
might prefer a menu, but many will outgrow it fast.  I usually 
run gnucap interactively, typing commands as I go, in a way 
that no graphic tool will do.

Plotting the data is the area of big need.  The best we have 
is "gwave" and there is room for improvement.  I usually run in 
as two commands ...

gnucap>  ac 20 20k decade 20 >my-file
gnucap> !gwave my-file &

Then another ...

gnucap> tran 0 100u 1u >my-file
gnucap> !gwave my-file &

If only gwave worked in a pipe .......

We really do need a good analog post-processor.  I would like to 
see it written entirely in an interpreted language, so the 
interpreter can be brought out to do calculations on the 
signals being displayed, and so others can add to it easily and 
distribute their extensions separately if they want to.

It is a good candidate for next summer's GSoC .. or for someone 
to start on anyway.  Here's an invitation for someone who might 
want to take this on ....  If you get started now, that will 
help your score when we rank the applications, improving your 
chance of getting funded.




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