Simulating Kicad schematics with Spice including using Jupyter Notebooks

test-ngspice_5_0

Christer Weinigel over at Christer’s Ramblings writes about switching from Tina TI to a new circuit simulator based on Spice:

A few weeks ago I got so frustrated that I started writing my own parser which can read a Kicad schematic file and extract the components and connectivity from those. And for some strange reason I also wrote a renderer which can render the schematic using matplotlib as a backend. This turned out to have it’s advantages…

Today I finally put together the missing parts, a converter which translates the Kicad schematic (including any spice model directives) to a Ngspice compatible circuit, runs ngspice in batch mode and then retrieves all the resulting values from the rawfile that Ngspice outputs.

And it actually seems to work decently.

Christer demonstrates, loading Python code for the simulation and plot. Further:

Originally I played around with wxPython and displayed my matplotlib plots in an embedded frame. My idea was to write a GUI (yeah, yet another GUI) that would let me set up and arrange multiple simulations and plots in a Window. But then I realised that since matplotlib is supported in Jupyter and that the easiest way to play around with and test things is to just use an interactive notebook. A big part of this blog post was actually generated by Jupyter and translated to Markdown with jupyter-nbconvert.

See the entire post on Christer’s Ramblings.

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