Circuit simulation with Gnucap
Gnucap (GNU Circuit Analysis Package) is a free and open-source circuit simulator. The syntax is very similar to SPICE - and circuit descriptions written for Gnucap might in fact work with SPICE with very little modification.
A lot of students (and probably working engineers as well) are familiar with programs such as OrCAD, PSPICE, etc., which use SPICE as a circuit simulator in the background. What these programs actually do is generate a SPICE netlist - similar to the one shown below.
* Voltage clipper Vin 1 0 sin(0 3 5) R1 1 2 100 D1 2 3 diode V1 3 0 dc 1 D1 0 4 diode V2 4 2 dc 1 .model diode D .print tran v(2) .tran 0 1 1m >clipper.dat .end
(This circuit description was actually written for Gnucap - but the syntax is almost the same as Spice.)
If you don't have a fancy front-end (such as OrCAD), you can run this simulation by saving this file as 'clipper.cir' and typing:gnucap -b clipper.cir
on the command line.
The output can be viewed with a waveform viewer such as gwave
:gwave clipper.dat
Various examples of SPICE & Gnucap circuit descriptions can be found in my Git repository at http://designtrail.net/repo/electronics/ .
The circuits can all be simulated by a command similar to the above:gnucap -b circuit.cir
(Replace "circuit.cir" with the name of the file.)
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