How to simulate electronic circuits

When you want to start a new project using electronic components, the first thing that comes to mind is a schematic. You imagine what components you need and how to draw the schematic. Once you’ve managed to come up with a design or perhaps tweaked an existing design, you’ll want to make a breadboard. But wait – maybe you want to test it without the physical circuits.

This is useful so you can catch simple mistakes and avoid building circuits that will just break your components. This way, you’ll save yourself the trouble of fixing things that should be clear for the more experienced. There are several ways you can insure the viability of your current design. Simulation is one.

To show how to do this, you’ll create a circuit that you can then simulate. You’ll create a few circuits to see what the workflow is that you need to achieve a reliable result. There are many methods you can choose: write your spice files manually, use an editor, or even write the test as they go using ngspice.

The gEDA suite of tools are suitable for creating schematics, testing the viability of a circuit and creating lists of components – a so-called BOM (Bill Of Materials). The developers have also included ways to check the way the circuit behaves, with many different ways to simulate the same circuit.

To test circuits, you first need to have a circuit. For this purpose, the gEDA package provides a series of programs: gschem, gattrib, gnetlist, gsch2pcb, gsymcheck and