domingo, outubro 18, 2009

Spicing up your design

I'm an old school hobbyist. I have fun building my projects and I never was a big fan of circuit simulations. The latter is not as funnier as the former.

Unfortunately, as I've already written here, Electronics is more expensive than software development. In order to have a good lab you need at least a good oscilloscope, two 0-30 VDC stabilized power supply with current control from 0 to 3A, a signal generator, a multimeter and a bunch of tools and components.

The problem is that it costs money. More than I'm willing to expend now. So, in order to save some money and at the same time keep studying and developing my circuits, I decided to use SPICE.

SPICE, my dear friend, is a circuit simulation tool that is very useful in the design cycle. The use of SPICE will let me correct my design flaws even before I need to expend a single resistor. So I will be able to test many different configurations and choose the best one while keeping costs low.

There are many flavors of SPICE available. I chosed LTSpice from Linear Technologies by many reasons: it is reliable, there are many LTSpice users that can help me solve my problems, it includes a wide variety of pre-built designs that makes it easy to learn LTSpice, there are many tutorials about it on the net, it is fast and it is free. More over, it is a Windows application that runs very well on Linux (thanks to WINE). And it is essential to me

I will write down everything I've learned during my self study on SPICE simulation.

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