Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie (almost there)
I think an AC power source should have power pins... Regards, Carlos El jue, 12-01-2006 a las 11:23 +0800, Dion escribió: I got these warnings also, but they went away when I created a new netlist with gnetlist -g spice-sdb .. As for the AC symbol, I am unsure. Enjoy. D. Marc wrote: I copied some of the new symbols over getting this output but im showing only 2 drc errors now :) so im almost there. the other thing i would like to know is i selected AC symbol gave it value of 240V but what pintypes do i set on it. WARNING: Symbol version mismatch on refdes C4 (capacitor-2.sym): Symbol in library is newer than instantiated symbol Minor version change (file 0.100, instantiated 0.000) WARNING: Symbol version mismatch on refdes C1 (capacitor-2.sym): Symbol in library is newer than instantiated symbol Minor version change (file 0.100, instantiated 0.000) WARNING: Symbol version mismatch on refdes C8 (capacitor-2.sym): Symbol in library is newer than instantiated symbol Minor version change (file 0.100, instantiated 0.000) WARNING: Symbol version mismatch on refdes C3 (capacitor-2.sym): Symbol in library is newer than instantiated symbol Minor version change (file 0.100, instantiated 0.000) WARNING: Symbol version mismatch on refdes C2 (capacitor-2.sym): Symbol in library is newer than instantiated symbol Minor version change (file 0.100, instantiated 0.000) WARNING: Symbol version mismatch on refdes C9 (capacitor-2.sym): Symbol in library is newer than instantiated symbol Minor version change (file 0.100, instantiated 0.000) WARNING: Symbol version mismatch on refdes C10 (capacitor-2.sym): Symbol in library is newer than instantiated symbol Minor version change (file 0.100, instantiated 0.000) Marc :)
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie (almost there)
I got these warnings also, but they went away when I created a new netlist with gnetlist -g spice-sdb .. As for the AC symbol, I am unsure. Enjoy. D. Marc wrote: I copied some of the new symbols over getting this output but im showing only 2 drc errors now :) so im almost there. the other thing i would like to know is i selected AC symbol gave it value of 240V but what pintypes do i set on it. WARNING: Symbol version mismatch on refdes C4 (capacitor-2.sym): Symbol in library is newer than instantiated symbol Minor version change (file 0.100, instantiated 0.000) WARNING: Symbol version mismatch on refdes C1 (capacitor-2.sym): Symbol in library is newer than instantiated symbol Minor version change (file 0.100, instantiated 0.000) WARNING: Symbol version mismatch on refdes C8 (capacitor-2.sym): Symbol in library is newer than instantiated symbol Minor version change (file 0.100, instantiated 0.000) WARNING: Symbol version mismatch on refdes C3 (capacitor-2.sym): Symbol in library is newer than instantiated symbol Minor version change (file 0.100, instantiated 0.000) WARNING: Symbol version mismatch on refdes C2 (capacitor-2.sym): Symbol in library is newer than instantiated symbol Minor version change (file 0.100, instantiated 0.000) WARNING: Symbol version mismatch on refdes C9 (capacitor-2.sym): Symbol in library is newer than instantiated symbol Minor version change (file 0.100, instantiated 0.000) WARNING: Symbol version mismatch on refdes C10 (capacitor-2.sym): Symbol in library is newer than instantiated symbol Minor version change (file 0.100, instantiated 0.000) Marc :) -- Never ascribe to malice that which may adequately be explained by incompetence. - Napoleon Bonaparte
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie (footprint)
Hi Mark, On Tuesday 10 January 2006 13:26, Marc wrote: I added footprint TO220 for 7815 that has 3 pins and it says Checking: /usr/share/gEDA/sym/linear/lm7815-1.sym Warning: Number of pins does not match footprint size. 1 warnings found No errors found Well as the footprint name is TO220 gsymcheck asumes that there should be 220 pins. This rule works fine for the most of the footprints like DIP14, SO20, QFP44, but fails on TO92, ... Just ignore the warning in this case. regards Werner
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie (footprint)
On Jan 10, 2006, at 11:39 AM, Werner Hoch wrote: I added footprint TO220 for 7815 that has 3 pins and it says Checking: /usr/share/gEDA/sym/linear/lm7815-1.sym Warning: Number of pins does not match footprint size. 1 warnings found No errors found Well as the footprint name is TO220 gsymcheck asumes that there should be 220 pins. Well that would certainly be an interesting voltage regulator. This rule works fine for the most of the footprints like DIP14, SO20, QFP44, but fails on TO92, ... So something really does pay attention to trailing digits in a footprint name...Does this strike anyone else as a big abstraction violation? -Dave -- Dave McGuireYou'll have to be a lot more specific than 'that Cape Coral, FL girl last night.'-Ted McFadden
Re: open source or closed source? was Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Mon, Jan 09, 2006 at 12:50:27AM -0500, Al Davis wrote: On Sunday 08 January 2006 11:51 am, John Doty wrote: On Jan 8, 2006, at 5:44 AM, Steve Meier wrote: The geda group should set up some method for donations as should other components. Open Source isn't free. It is payed for mostly by the developers who donate their time. Those of us who like these tools can tell the developers how much we appreciate their efforts by giving at least a little. Those of us who make a living using these tools should donate a lot. Yes! I'm sending a customer two big budget proposals today, one for a project continuation, one for a new project. Ales, Stuart et al. definitely deserve a cut... I have been investigating sources of funding for gnucap. There is a possibility of funding based on the sale of non-GPL licenses of ACS (Al's Circuit Simulator, from which gnucap is derived). If I could get enough support, I would do it full time. If there is really enough, I would expand the staff. Or you could do it like Ronja - make some feature/fix pack and then say that it's prepared for publishing and tell how much you want to release. So some company who would use it would pay because they don't have time to waste with some problems. And I could send money too when I need it on Ronja development and put it into the development cost :) Problem with your approach is that it is ideologically incorrect from the Free Software point of view. What if the interest in closed source ceases at all? Will you start picking up blueberries in the wood to stay alive? CL I thought of making a business, but I don't want to do the business type of work myself ... management, sales, etc. Been there, done that, once is enough. My plan of trying to do it through an academic position has not been working. I accomplished more when I was working for an EDA company, and managed to negotiate an IP contract that let me keep working on it. I left when the company was acquired and the new owner would not go along with it.
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie (lm741 symbol)
Hi Marc,
your symbol is technically correct. Some points about it:
- Attributes like numslots and footprint are usually not pin
attributes. I mean you don't add them to a pin. They are placed as
hidden text in the symbol. Currently you added them as they were
attributes of the pin number 1.
- Some people don't like heavy symbols: symbols with attributes like
the footprint attached. They prefer adding them after the schematic is
drawn, as they can use the symbol for other variations of the IC, for
example, a LM741 in SMD package.
Personally, I'd better like an operational amplifier's like symbol for
an operational amplifier, so I can see what it is at first glance... I
noticed you draw the symbol as shown in the National's LM741 datasheet.
In the first page of that datasheet, there is also an example of an
offset nulling circuit. I mean a symbol like that. However, every one
has his own preferences. If you like the symbol as is, it's fine.
Regards,
Carlos
El lun, 09-01-2006 a las 01:53 +, Marc escribió:
This symbol shows no errors now and allows you to attach stuff anyone
who cares to try it out let me know if i did it ok
Marc :)
documento de texto sencillo adjunto (lm741-2.sym)
v 20050820 1
T -475 850 8 8 0 0 0 0 1
device=LM741
T 338 1414 9 8 1 0 0 0 1
LM741
T 1114 1470 8 10 1 1 0 0 1
refdes=U?
P 300 500 0 500 1 0 1
{
T 167 606 5 8 1 1 0 0 1
pinnumber=3
T 50 519 5 8 0 0 0 0 1
pinseq=3
T 200 494 5 10 0 0 0 0 1
pinlabel=3
T 200 494 5 10 0 0 0 0 1
pintype=in
}
P 300 100 0 100 1 0 1
{
T 150 69 5 8 0 0 270 0 1
pinseq=4
T 300 94 5 10 0 0 270 0 1
pinlabel=4
T 300 94 5 10 0 0 270 0 1
pintype=pwr
T 139 208 5 10 1 1 0 0 1
pinnumber=4
}
P 1300 500 1600 500 1 0 1
{
T 1384 619 5 8 1 1 0 0 1
pinnumber=6
T 1375 519 5 8 0 0 0 0 1
pinseq=6
T 1300 494 5 10 0 0 0 0 1
pinlabel=6
T 1300 494 5 10 0 0 0 0 1
pintype=out
}
P 1300 900 1600 900 1 0 1
{
T 1375 844 5 8 0 0 270 0 1
pinseq=7
T 1300 894 5 10 0 0 270 0 1
pintype=pwr
T 1381 1007 5 10 1 1 0 0 1
pinlabel=7
T 1300 894 5 10 0 0 0 0 1
pinnumber=7
}
L 300 1400 300 0 3 0 0 0 -1 -1
L 1300 1400 300 1400 3 0 0 0 -1 -1
L 1300 0 300 0 3 0 0 0 -1 -1
P 1300 100 1600 100 1 0 1
{
T 1395 222 5 8 1 1 0 0 1
pinnumber=5
T 1375 119 5 8 0 0 0 0 1
pinseq=5
T 1300 94 5 10 0 0 0 0 1
pinlabel=5
T 1300 94 5 10 0 0 0 0 1
pintype=pas
}
P 300 1300 0 1300 1 0 1
{
T 226 1247 5 8 0 0 270 2 1
pinseq=1
T 301 1297 5 10 0 0 270 2 1
pintype=pas
T 249 1402 5 10 1 1 0 6 1
pinlabel=1
T 301 1297 5 10 0 0 0 0 1
numslots=0
T 301 1297 5 10 0 0 0 0 1
footprint=DIP8
T 301 1297 5 10 0 0 0 0 1
pinnumber=1
}
P 1300 1300 1600 1300 1 0 1
{
T 1383 1419 5 8 1 1 0 0 1
pinnumber=8
T 1575 1319 5 8 0 0 0 0 1
pinseq=8
T 1500 1294 5 10 0 0 0 0 1
pinlabel=8
T 1500 1294 5 10 0 0 0 0 1
pintype=pas
}
L 1300 1400 1300 0 3 0 0 0 -1 -1
T 417 386 9 6 1 0 0 0 1
in +
T 963 878 9 6 1 0 0 0 1
Vcc
P 300 900 0 900 1 0 1
{
T 169 1013 5 8 1 1 0 0 1
pinnumber=2
T 152 926 5 8 0 0 0 0 1
pinseq=2
T 302 901 5 10 0 0 0 0 1
pinlabel=2
T 302 901 5 10 0 0 0 0 1
pintype=in
}
T 416 869 9 6 1 0 0 0 1
in -
T 419 1090 9 6 1 0 0 0 2
offset
T 421 1159 9 6 1 0 0 0 1
null
T 897 24 9 6 1 0 0 0 1
null
T 895 -45 9 6 1 0 0 0 2
offset
T 1083 1287 9 6 1 0 0 0 1
nc
T 884 463 9 6 1 0 0 0 1
output
T 423 80 9 6 1 0 0 0 1
Vee
--
Carlos Nieves Ónega [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
Al Davis wrote: On Saturday 07 January 2006 03:08 pm, Stuart Brorson wrote: [1] To the well-known simulation developer who e-mailed me recently about LTSpice: Sorry, but LTSpice is a wonderful simulator. And it's free (as in beer) too, which is probably all that Marc cares about. I meant what I said. Every word of it. For those who missed it, here it is again: === Promoting the competition again. Closed-source freeware is our most threatening competition. Another possibility is Oregano and gnucap. This is a more integrated environment, and is still GPL. === If we can't beat LTSpice in the eyes of a newbie, we might as well shut the whole gEDA project down. We need to beat them on their terms. I believe we can, but we need to make some changes. We need to recognize our weaknesses and deal with them. In some cases, major surgery is required. We need to take the lead. We should own the beginner market. Not just be a player in it, we should OWN it. I believe we can do it. All of free technology in electronics is dependent on us. We are the ambassadors of free/open-source to EE's. When we tell newcomers to go away, to such a competitor, we admit failure. When we tell them to go to a competitor that laughs at us, we really admit failure. Oregano is a friend. It is GPL, etc... Gnucap is here. The developers are on this list, unlike NG-Spice... But LT-Spice, Eagle, the PSPICE demo, the Multi-sim demo sorry. I support Al Davis. We need to bring more people into the free software. Close Window$ ! Open source !! Free software from proprietary mafia. Anand
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
Close Window$ ! Open source !! Free software from proprietary mafia. Anand, I'll listen to you when you contribute a few patches to gEDA. Stuart
open source or closed source? was Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
In general I prefer open source especially for engineering/science. Why? Well Tools are never perfect open source lets me fix the tool and attempt to understand the model. What if the open source tool doesn't exist or is so far away from having the required capabilities? Then it is a mater of is the task more important then the tools. If the task is more important I use proprietary tools. If the task is less important then I work on the tools or wait for the tools to mature to accomplish the task. What if a user group exists that helps new users and that group is centered around a closed source tool? More power to them If a new user needs help and the open source users haven't been able to provide the level of support then is it not better to refer the new user to the place where they can get the help they need? I prefer to do it in as friendly away as possible and might even suggest they try the competition and the open source tools. I would hope as they grow in capabilities they come back to the open source tools with ideas on how to improve the tools and they come back ready to help new users themselves. In general I am not afraid of competition, I think the case for open source is so overwhelming that it is just a mater of time. Time, good spirts amoung the developers and the users. While I am at it the pcb project allows for donations through the sourceforge web site. The Icarus web site also has a donation mechanism or at least it did the last time I looked. The geda group should set up some method for donations as should other components. Open Source isn't free. It is payed for mostly by the developers who donate their time. Those of us who like these tools can tell the developers how much we appreciate their efforts by giving at least a little. Those of us who make a living using these tools should donate a lot. The exception to this idea is that users such as Karel Kulhavey who are giving away their work Ronga are doing in my opinion as much as the developers are by promoting the tools. I strongly encourage the active users to work on the documentation and tutorials to help the new comers. Peace, Steve Meier
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Saturday 07 January 2006 03:08 pm, Stuart Brorson wrote: [1] =A0To the well-known simulation developer who e-mailed me recently about LTSpice: =A0Sorry, but LTSpice is a wonderful simulator. =A0 And it's free (as in beer) too, which is probably all that Marc cares about. I meant what I said. Every word of it.=20 For those who missed it, here it is again: =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Promoting the competition again. Closed-source freeware is our most threatening competition. Another possibility is Oregano and gnucap. This is a more=20 integrated environment, and is still GPL. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D If we can't beat LTSpice in the eyes of a newbie, we might as=20 well shut the whole gEDA project down. We need to beat them on=20 their terms. I believe we can, but we need to make some changes. We need to=20 recognize our weaknesses and deal with them. In some cases,=20 major surgery is required. We need to take the lead. We should own the beginner market. Not just be a player in it,=20 we should OWN it. I believe we can do it. All of free=20 technology in electronics is dependent on us. We are the=20 ambassadors of free/open-source to EE's. When we tell newcomers to go away, to such a competitor, we=20 admit failure. When we tell them to go to a competitor that=20 laughs at us, we really admit failure. Oregano is a friend. It is GPL, etc... Gnucap is here. The developers are on this list, unlike=20 NG-Spice... But LT-Spice, Eagle, the PSPICE demo, the Multi-sim demo =20 sorry. Al, Your large stature in the open-source EDA community deserves a better reply from me. Unfortunately, I don't have the necessary time to formulate and write all my thoughts elegantly enough to do you justice. Some day I will write and post an essay about the economics (in the broadest sense) of free/open-source software. There is a lot to say about it. As for your points about commercial vs. open-source: Unfortunately, LTSpice is simply better for certain newbies than gEDA. It's a drop-dead Windoze SPICE simulator with integrated schematic capture. It's an all-in-one package simple enough for a total fool to use. Doing SPICE or Gnucap using gEDA, on the other hand, involves chaining at least three programs together: gschem - gnetlist - [ngspice, Gnucap]. Each program is run from the command line. Each program has a learning curve. Getting results from the simulators requires learning the CLI langurage. The learning curve for each isn't bad, really, if you have a little experience. However, for the total newbie who doesn't understand the first thing about electronics or EDA it can be daunting. Therefore, at the present time LTSpice is simply a better alternative for an impatient, whining, clueless newbie. It gets him to his goal faster, and with less grief than trying to learn gEDA (or any other package, too, I suppose). In the future, I hope that gEDA progresses to the point where it is a credible alternative to LTSpice. When we tell newcomers to go away, to such a competitor, we=20 admit failure. When we tell them to go to a competitor that=20 laughs at us, we really admit failure. I have three points about this: 1. First off, I don't view gEDA as a competitor to anything. It's an open-source project which aims to be useful to folks doing electronics. If it's not useful to some people, that's fine too. Open source is about cooperation, not competition. Folks who want to compete should go into commercial software. 2. Some time ago, somebody posted here a link to an article about when you should fire your customer. That is, as people who develop software, we have customers. Many of them are happy to use the software, since it allows them to be productive. Some of those users actually contribute back to the project, which is great. On the other hand, some customers do nothing other than complain and whine and demand extra attention to solve their problem. They don't bother to read the documentation, but they have no idea about what they are doing. And if you don't solve their problem, they say it's because your software stinks. Basically, such customers are cranks. It's generally good business practice (as well as open-source project practice) to give cranks the brush-off, IHMO, since they can do damage to your project. They can badmouth it publically. They can cause dissention amongst developers. They will waste your development time, and so on. YMMV. 3. Also, when helping an newbie, I tend to do a cost-benefit type analysis. That is, I am happy to answer a few questions, and point *any* newbie in the direction of some resources. The cost in my time is small. If the newbie seems clueful and might make some kind of contribution back to the gEDA project (i.e. code patches), then I'm happy to spend *lots* of time helping him, since investing time
Re: open source or closed source? was Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Jan 8, 2006, at 5:44 AM, Steve Meier wrote: The geda group should set up some method for donations as should other components. Open Source isn't free. It is payed for mostly by the developers who donate their time. Those of us who like these tools can tell the developers how much we appreciate their efforts by giving at least a little. Those of us who make a living using these tools should donate a lot. Yes! I'm sending a customer two big budget proposals today, one for a project continuation, one for a new project. Ales, Stuart et al. definitely deserve a cut... John Doty Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Sunday 08 January 2006 07:14 am, Stuart Brorson wrote: Anand, I'll listen to you when you contribute a few patches to gEDA. Stuart Anand maintains the Slackware ports.
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Sunday 08 January 2006 13:30, Marc wrote: !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC -//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN Please don't post in html. For security reasons, normal folks do not enable html in their email agents. html head meta content=text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1 http-equiv=Content-Type title/title /head body bgcolor=#ff text=#00 pin 2 innbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; in-br pin 3 innbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; in+br pin 4 pwrnbsp; gndbr pin 6 outbr pin 7nbsp; ?nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; v+br br what do i put for pin 7 pls is it pwr again ?br br Marc :)br br table align=center border=1 cellpadding=3 tbody tr td align=leftin/td td align=leftInput/td /tr tr td align=leftout/td td align=leftOutput/td /tr tr td align=leftio/td td align=leftInput/Output/td /tr tr td align=leftoc/td td align=leftOpen collector/td /tr tr td align=leftoe/td td align=leftOpen emitter/td /tr tr td align=leftpas/td td align=leftPassive/td /tr tr td align=lefttp/td td align=leftTotem pole/td /tr tr td align=lefttri/td td align=leftTristate (high impedance)/td /tr tr td align=leftclk/td td align=leftClock/td /tr tr td align=leftpwr/td td align=leftPower/Ground/td /tr /tbody /table br /body /html -- Cheers, Gene People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word 'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
RE: gEDA-user: lost newbie vs geDA
Well, since the 741 has only one unit, include a numslots=0 attribute to quiet the slotdef complaint. As to the Number of pins does not match footprint size complaint, you'll need to engage your brain and find out what's so objectionable about the footprint that it doesn't correspond to the symbol. At any rate, if you're only doing SPICE simulation, you can reasonably ignore any footprint complaints. As I've suggested earlier, gsymcheck is a little too anal for my purposes, and I use it to discover big mistakes rather than marginal technicalities. Marshall -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Marc Sent: Sun 1/8/2006 1:46 PM To: geda-user@seul.org Subject: gEDA-user: lost newbie vs geDA Checking: /geda-test/share/gEDA/sym/linear/lm741-1.sym Warning: Number of pins does not match footprint size. ERROR: Invalid slotdef=1 attributes, not continuing 1 warnings found 1 ERROR found im getting there down from 12 errors Marc :) winmail.dat
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie vs gEDA
Hi Marc, edit the symbol, do edit-move symbol and enter a 0 in the opening window asking for the offset. It is in the symbol creation guide: http://geda.seul.org/docs/current/symbols/node3.html This is what 'translate the symbol to the origin' means. Regards, Carlos El dom, 08-01-2006 a las 21:40 +, Marc escribió: Im at zero errors with the LM741 ive built new symbol but the connections wont join up to the pins when i place the part is there a certain distance or something ive got to set in the drawing. Marc :) BusyBox64 linear # gsymcheck lm741-1.sym gEDA/gsymcheck version 20050820 gEDA/symcheck comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; see COPYING for more details. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; please see the COPYING file for more details. Checking: /geda-test/share/gEDA/sym/linear/lm741-1.sym No errors found
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
I don't know what symbol are you talking about. However, it seems like pin 7 is the power supply pin. If so, then it should be pwr. Carlos El dom, 08-01-2006 a las 18:30 +, Marc escribió: pin 2 in in- pin 3 in in+ pin 4 pwr gnd pin 6 out pin 7 ? v+ what do i put for pin 7 pls is it pwr again ? Marc :) in Input out Output io Input/Output oc Open collector oe Open emitter pas Passive tp Totem pole tri Tristate (high impedance) clk Clock pwr Power/Ground -- Carlos Nieves Ónega [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
Al Davis wrote: This is much too complex a circuit to be your first SPICE sim. I suggest starting much smaller. Seriously consider verifying that resistors follow Ohm's law for your first try (no, I am not trying to insult you: SPICE is *hard* to use). agreed. At this point I can be considered a highly experienced user of a certain commercial cad tool and an experienced designer. So what did I do a month back? I simulated a circuit from school 15 years ago because I was learning yet another new feature in the simulator and wanted to verify that the simulator did what I thought it should do. If I were to switch to another simulator I'd do the same thing. Most profs that I know wait until electronics, at the diode or one-transistor level. Then they use something that hides the netlist, usually the PSPICE demo. The books are written for it, and they too hide the netlist. It takes them about 3 classes to introduce it to the one transistor level, and they still can't use a netlist. Then they drop it because it is unimportant, and is considered to be a nuisance. And the reality of it is that you will never (at least as far as I can see) escape needing to understand netlists if you make any serious use of a simulator. I still have to look at the netlists generated sometimes with the high $$ commercial tool I use. When the GUI runs amok, and evidently you can't pay enough money for this to not happen, you _have_ to be able to look at the netlist and figure out what happened. Then later, in another course, they need to do more. They never learn that you can use the simulator to see things you can't see in the lab. Homework assignments are cut down so they fit the PSPICE demo. They still never see the netlist. mm gnucap. m being able to do things like look at diode junction current independently from current charging capacitances. At some point, they move to something like Cadence or Mentor, which has the multiple programs like gEDA. They can't run it at home, so they limit their exposure to it, struggle for days with it. It is as hard to use as gEDA. Even at this point, they still are not past what oregano and Spice 3f5 can do. FWIW, I actually find basic simulations within cadence to be pretty easy, but I am pretty far removed from being a beginner. But for basic stuff it's not too hard to get up and going. I don't know why you'd bother with it in an academic environmnet unless you were planning on doing some real IC design where you had to do the layout as well. The inability to access it on your own or after you leave school is just too big a price. Thats why I quit using matlab. I was writing too much code in school that I wanted to be able to carry forward with me so I switched to scilab. -Dan
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Jan 8, 2006, at 1:56 PM, Gene Heskett wrote: !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC -//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN Please don't post in html. For security reasons, normal folks do not enable html in their email agents. For a lot more than security reasons. Let's not forget dramatically inflated message size, compatibility readability issues, and just good old-fashioned manners. Further, it's been suggested that the amount of HTML moving around on TCP port 25 is becoming a two-digit-percentage of the amount of HTML on port 80...that's just *wrong*. Thanks, Microsoft. -Dave -- Dave McGuireYou'll have to be a lot more specific than 'that Cape Coral, FL girl last night.'-Ted McFadden
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
Stuart Brorson wrote: On Sunday 08 January 2006 07:14 am, Stuart Brorson wrote: Anand, I'll listen to you when you contribute a few patches to gEDA. Stuart Anand maintains the Slackware ports. Oh. Then I apologize! Sorry Anand! I didn't realize you were a contributor! Folks making a contribution are the backbone of any open-source project, and they should be accorded all respect and praise. Stuart No problem Stuart. Thanks Al Davis for recognizing my small contribution. Anand
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie vs gEDA
Pins need to begin on a 100mil grid point. http://www.geda.seul.org/docs/current/symbols/node3.html (* jcl *) On 1/8/06, Marc [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Im at zero errors with the LM741 ive built new symbol but the connections wont join up to the pins when i place the part is there a certain distance or something ive got to set in the drawing. Marc :) BusyBox64 linear # gsymcheck lm741-1.sym gEDA/gsymcheck version 20050820 gEDA/symcheck comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; see COPYING for more details. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; please see the COPYING file for more details. Checking: /geda-test/share/gEDA/sym/linear/lm741-1.sym No errors found -- http://www.luciani.org
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Sunday 08 January 2006 21:45, Dan McMahill wrote: Marc wrote: Dan you forgot to mention its cheaper to run a sim before you actually build anything im not currently in college as everyone suggests here but i might go do Physics next year im currently tired of doing college courses i just finished Cisco. Marc :) For IC design I agree completely and in that area I simulate things almost every day. For many analog board level designs, I don't agree. There are many circuits for which a hand analysis is completely adequate and a spice simulation is the wrong tool for the job. If it's a commercial environment, you can quite easily spend more paying for someone to try and come up with a simulation which is even close to reality than having them just build the thing. What you very quickly run into unless it is something like a filter or a transistor amplifier is that the models either don't exist or aren't good enough to be worth anything. Take a switching power supply. You can simulate the power stage (with some modeling effort), but the controller chips are complex and you can spend more time trying to come up with a behavioural model which is even 0th order correct than actually building something. A lot of the transistor models which are available for discretes aren't very good either. Sometimes it's due to a large process variation, sometimes because of poor extraction of the model, sometimes because the model used isn't capable of predicting the sort of behaviour of interest. I came across an example of this recently where someone had some discrete FET models which are not capable of subthreshold modeling but the designer was designing a subthreshold circuit. I've designed a fairly large number of analog board level circuits and essentially none of the problems I've run into when testing them in the lab would have been predicted by a simulation. About the only board level simulation I've ever found to be useful is for some filters where I wanted to look at some statistical analysis and in cases where I wanted to model some finite Q's and board parasitics on some RF filters. Certainly other cases can be found, but by in large I have not felt that board level analog simulators have been important. I'm sure others will disagree with me on this. -Dan No, in the real world, I'd concur. Example: I needed to build an audio distribution amplifier for the tv station to replace one designed by an employee, and which had a higher than desirable failure rate in its LM7x15 regulators as the whole card cage ran pretty warm from them and the output stages. So rather than build an output stage good for 5 or more watts of audio, with its huge TO-5 transistors heat sinks, I simply used the handiest cheap by X4 opamp at the time, a TLO84. Under testing after the first etched board was populated, it worked great, with distortion into a 600 ohm load at .01% up to about 27 volts peak across the load. So we built about 30 of them, and are still using them. The achilles heel of such a design? Long I/O lines scattered out over several hundred feet of building makes a hell of a good EMP pickup, and with a 255 foot tower outside the back door getting tapped by mother nature fairly regularly, the failure rate of the TLO84's has been rather high. But the transistors used in the previous version were similarly aflicted too, so that was a wash. They were soldered, and the TLO84's were socketed, so repairs were quicker for the TLO84 based design. I had 10x more bandwidth and 5% of the power disappation of a 5532 design, which 99% of the commercial DA makers were useing, at nearly 10x a chip greater cost zero benefits as their output stages are pretty fragile in the real world too. 5532's need clipon heat sinks and cooling fans or the failure rate looks like Orvill R's Popcorn in the real world. The end result was better sounding, but no more dependable than the older circuit which due to common output amps, didn't have the individual output level controls my circuit has. My circuit also ran about 5 watts a card cooler, taking the cage temps down by about 35F internallly. There's 22 of them in the cage, on 3/4 centers, in an open frame design, with a 50 lb brute force psu located else where in the rack. To have taken the time to run a spice on it would have been, I think, a total waste of time since spice would not have caught that potential failure mode. So we keep a stick or two of TLO84's on hand. And about once a year, we use quite a few of them... -- Cheers, Gene People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word 'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
Well, I am a college student (1st year grad) and have followed this discussion with much interest. The dilemmas described sound like my undergrad experience exactly. I was introduced to PSpice as a sophomore but solely through the schematic capture. Imagine my struggle when my teacher included netlists in his Electronic Circuits book the following year (I will reserve further opinions of this book). This was not the PSpice I knew so I ignored them, which may have been detrimental the following year in my mixed-signal VLSI class. The thought of that class still sickens me. Now I am trying to conquer my former demons and face my fears, which means that I will be taking a class in communications circuits this semester. I have previously posted on here that we will be using WinSpice and have received some alternative methods from several of you on here (thanks!) Coming into this class, I feel like I am a complete newbie when it comes to learning any sort of SPICE program. I am planning on using ngspice as much as possible with WinSpice (and hence, teacher support) as a final safety net. But I agree that to be introduced to the finer points earlier would have been very beneficial and could have possibly prevented me from turning away from circuit design. (Sorry - my two cents turned into more of a quarter)
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Jan 8, 2006, at 7:45 PM, Dan McMahill wrote: Marc wrote: Dan you forgot to mention its cheaper to run a sim before you actually build anything im not currently in college as everyone suggests here but i might go do Physics next year im currently tired of doing college courses i just finished Cisco. Marc :) For IC design I agree completely and in that area I simulate things almost every day. For many analog board level designs, I don't agree. There are many circuits for which a hand analysis is completely adequate and a spice simulation is the wrong tool for the job. If it's a commercial environment, you can quite easily spend more paying for someone to try and come up with a simulation which is even close to reality than having them just build the thing. What you very quickly run into unless it is something like a filter or a transistor amplifier is that the models either don't exist or aren't good enough to be worth anything. Take a switching power supply. You can simulate the power stage (with some modeling effort), but the controller chips are complex and you can spend more time trying to come up with a behavioural model which is even 0th order correct than actually building something. A lot of the transistor models which are available for discretes aren't very good either. Sometimes it's due to a large process variation, sometimes because of poor extraction of the model, sometimes because the model used isn't capable of predicting the sort of behaviour of interest. I came across an example of this recently where someone had some discrete FET models which are not capable of subthreshold modeling but the designer was designing a subthreshold circuit. I've designed a fairly large number of analog board level circuits and essentially none of the problems I've run into when testing them in the lab would have been predicted by a simulation. About the only board level simulation I've ever found to be useful is for some filters where I wanted to look at some statistical analysis and in cases where I wanted to model some finite Q's and board parasitics on some RF filters. Certainly other cases can be found, but by in large I have not felt that board level analog simulators have been important. I'm sure others will disagree with me on this. Well, I agree completely. Simulation does not prevent smoke. The accuracy of component models is difficult to assess. When you simulate, you generally should be seeking the answer to a specific question, not a general functional test. What you simulate is generally not the circuit you build, but has large portions sketched in in idealized ways, and has extra components representing parasitics around the piece you're probing. In many cases, it's much quicker and easier to make a prototype and try it. Unless you're a real simulation expert, a real circuit is likely to yield more insight than a simulation, too. John Doty Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: open source or closed source? was Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Sunday 08 January 2006 11:51 am, John Doty wrote: On Jan 8, 2006, at 5:44 AM, Steve Meier wrote: The geda group should set up some method for donations as should other components. Open Source isn't free. It is payed for mostly by the developers who donate their time. Those of us who like these tools can tell the developers how much we appreciate their efforts by giving at least a little. Those of us who make a living using these tools should donate a lot. Yes! I'm sending a customer two big budget proposals today, one for a project continuation, one for a new project. Ales, Stuart et al. definitely deserve a cut... I have been investigating sources of funding for gnucap. There is a possibility of funding based on the sale of non-GPL licenses of ACS (Al's Circuit Simulator, from which gnucap is derived). If I could get enough support, I would do it full time. If there is really enough, I would expand the staff. I thought of making a business, but I don't want to do the business type of work myself ... management, sales, etc. Been there, done that, once is enough. My plan of trying to do it through an academic position has not been working. I accomplished more when I was working for an EDA company, and managed to negotiate an IP contract that let me keep working on it. I left when the company was acquired and the new owner would not go along with it.
RE: gEDA-user: lost newbie
Marc, I've tried the drc2 script and I'm finding it zeroes on exactly on unimportant things, but still gives me no hints on my problem. Don't sweat the errors it finds, but just look it over for reminders about things you should be checking in your schematic. And by the way, I appreciate your taking the time to ask questions here, but damn, could you not be so sparing with the punctuation? 8-) Seriously, it's on the keyboard because we English speakers rely on it to help convey meaning. Cheers, Marshall -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Marc Sent: Sat 1/7/2006 1:39 PM To: geda-user@seul.org Subject: gEDA-user: lost newbie Well im having simular problems with errors im upto 22 errors now and dont know what i am doing wrong i got time to kill while waiting for that book to arrive Amazon says 20days :( this is what im getting. seems like the type of pins or something? Invalid wanted_pin passed to get-nets [unknown] Invalid wanted_pin passed to get-nets [unknown] and from the command line. gnetlist -g drc2 powersupply2.sch -o drc_output.txt Checking non-numbered parts..[deleted the rest] winmail.dat
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Sat, Jan 07, 2006 at 12:09:30AM -0500, DJ Delorie wrote: A few years ago our VCR died. I opens it up and checks the fuses, one is blown. No problem, I know how to replace a fuse. Power it up again, let the smoke out of one of the transistors. Ok, now we know what the fuse was protecting. Once I soldered Ronja RX and powered it up and tested and it seemed to be OK, just no data were passing through. So I started to open the shielding cans of the Ronja system and when I came to RX, a horribly stinking smoke came out. One of the resistors was cremated and the schematic had a big brown smoky blotch on it. I found out that I soldered the resistor one pin off and instead of going from power to the video amplifier chip, it went from power to ground. And it was just couple of ohms for a HF power filter. The resistor was replaced and the device is I think happily operating now - still with the charred schematic inside :D Morale: User Controlled Technology is easy to repair. CL
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
ngspice -b -i powersupply2.cir -r powersupply2.out; raw2gw powersupply2.out powersupply2.gw Fatal error: t1: transmission line z0 must be given Like I pointed out earlier, SPICE has no model for a transformer. When you netlist your schematic, the transformer (T1) is included into the SPICE netlist. However, ngspice (like any SPICE) thinks you are instantiating a transmission line with device T1. Since you don't give the proper parameters for a transmission line, ngspice errors out. I suggest you Google SPICE transformer model or something like that. Also go over to the LTSpice user group (on Yahoo) and look through the archives. ISTR the issue of simulating transformers comes up every couple of years there. Stuart
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
A collage Lab partner did something similar.. On a bread board he plugged a quarter watt 5 ohm resistor from +5v to ground. He too, was off by a pin. The resistor was glowing bright red in about a second. Now why did it take Edison so long to invent the light bulb? Oh as for the resistor. Well After it cooled down we check its resistance... It had become about 100 ohms or so. Steve Meier Karel Kulhavy wrote: On Sat, Jan 07, 2006 at 12:09:30AM -0500, DJ Delorie wrote: A few years ago our VCR died. I opens it up and checks the fuses, one is blown. No problem, I know how to replace a fuse. Power it up again, let the smoke out of one of the transistors. Ok, now we know what the fuse was protecting. Once I soldered Ronja RX and powered it up and tested and it seemed to be OK, just no data were passing through. So I started to open the shielding cans of the Ronja system and when I came to RX, a horribly stinking smoke came out. One of the resistors was cremated and the schematic had a big brown smoky blotch on it. I found out that I soldered the resistor one pin off and instead of going from power to the video amplifier chip, it went from power to ground. And it was just couple of ohms for a HF power filter. The resistor was replaced and the device is I think happily operating now - still with the charred schematic inside :D Morale: User Controlled Technology is easy to repair. CL
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
what about the other 21 errors Your problem is not gEDA. Rather, your problem is that you need to learn more about electronics in general, and SPICE (and it's capabilities) in particular. No SPICE program in the world can provide good results at the hands of somebody who doesn't marginally understand it. Sighs geda aint very productive for me at the moment im seriously thinking about dumping geda and getting another pc to run windows. This might be a wise move for you, since gEDA -- although it is not user unfriendly -- requires a certain threshold of knowledge to use. I suggest you get a Windoze PC and download LTSpice from the Linear Technologies website [1]. You should also subscribe to the LTSpice user group on Yahoo groups. They are very newbie-friendly there. all i want to do i dump components onscreen join them up give it a value and run a sim Ya can't run a sim without knowing something about the simulator. Stuart [1] To the well-known simulation developer who e-mailed me recently about LTSpice: Sorry, but LTSpice is a wonderful simulator. And it's free (as in beer) too, which is probably all that Marc cares about.
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie (less frustrated cos ive got somewhere)
My last suggestion to you: Download the examples at the bottom of this page: http://www.brorson.com/gEDA/SPICE/ And take a look at how they attach attributes to the individual components. Otherwise, I see LTSpice in your future. Stuart LED1 0 6 No valid value attribute found GND 0 No valid value attribute found L1 2 1 No valid value attribute U2 ERROR_INVALID_PIN 0 7 0 ERROR_INVALID_PIN No valid value attribute found U1 1 0 3 No valid value attribute found ok im back down to 16 errors i ran a sim and it gave these errors any ideas pls Marc :)
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
Great! Please also subscribe to the LTSpice Yahoo group. They field a lot of newbie questions there. And tell Helmut, the dude who moderates it, that I sent you! Stuart already downloaded LTspice just installing wine on gentoo :) Marc
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Sat, Jan 07, 2006 at 02:42:50AM +, Marc wrote: I just bought The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill Also Would this book by David Lines teach me how to build Neon Sign Generators? Power Supplies Projects for the Hobbyist and Technician by David Lines ISBN 0-7906-1120-1 Master Publishing, Inc I have a Tesla Coil/Tesla Amplifier which i am building already got a large Variac and 2 x 70KV 0.01mfd rapid discharge capacitors apparently from a Laser. High voltage is no fun: http://www.strangepersons.com/content/item/15351.html Note how the daylight became pale in comparison with the new source of bright white light. And this is what your hand will look like when you touch a charged cap: http://www.expertwitness-electric.com/images/images/IFEP_images/Landscape_Jpgs/JPGs_with_Borders/ElecFlash_Burns_(SSPathology)_017.jpg or like this: http://www.emedicinehealth.com/images/4453/4453-4474-6142-9474.jpg I actually wonder what effect this posting can have on the probability that you injure yourself playing with high voltage... CL Marc :)
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie (less frustrated cos ive got somewhere)
On Jan 7, 2006, at 1:03 PM, Marc wrote: LED1 0 6 No valid value attribute found The spice netlister thinks this is an inductor, because its refdes begins with L. Use D for a diode (but then you'd need a model). Or you could substitute a 200 ohm resistor for sim purposes. GND 0 No valid value attribute found Not sure what you did here. I use the symbol gnd-1 from the power library and don't see this. L1 2 1 No valid value attribute Another inductor without a value. U2 ERROR_INVALID_PIN 0 7 0 ERROR_INVALID_PIN No valid value attribute found U indicates a distributed RC line to SPICE. For complex subcircuits you need X (and a subcircuit file to simulate whatever it does!). U1 1 0 3 No valid value attribute found Ditto. ok im back down to 16 errors i ran a sim and it gave these errors any ideas pls Marc :) John Doty Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
Hi Marc, let me explain what is happening. When building a symbol, a pin should have some attributes: at least the pinlabel, the pinnumber and the pintype. The latter can have values like in (input), out, pas (passive), io (input-output), for example. The drc2 backend checks the pintype, and report errors like an output pin connected to an output pin, for example. If the pintype attribute is not set, the pintype will be 'unknown'. The drc2 backend will report as an error any connection to a pin with an 'unknown' pintype, no matter what kind of pin is connected to it. This is the kind of errors you are getting in your schematic. There are some symbols in the library without the pintype attribute (just because nobody added them when the symbol was created). I spent some time fixing some common symbols, but there are still some unfixed symbols (mainly integrated circuits). Fixing them is easy, however it's also time consuming, specially with integrated circuits (patches are welcome!), so I hope that people will fix them as soon as they use those symbols. You can check if a symbol is correct by using gsymcheck. You are using the lm7815-1.sym symbol. So if I run 'gsymcheck -vv lm7815-1.sym', it reports: -- begin gsymcheck output gEDA/gsymcheck version 20050820 gEDA/symcheck comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; see COPYING for more details. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; please see the COPYING file for more details. Checking: /home/cnieves/temp/geda_cvs/geda_cvs/geda/devel/symbols/linear/lm7815-1.sym Warning: Missing pinlabel= attribute Warning: Missing pintype= attribute Warning: Missing pinlabel= attribute Warning: Missing pintype= attribute Warning: Missing pinlabel= attribute Warning: Missing pintype= attribute Warning: Missing footprint= attribute Warning: Did not find numslots= attribute, not checking slotting ERROR: Found duplicate pinnumber=2 attribute in the symbol ERROR: Found duplicate pinnumber=2 attribute in the symbol 8 warnings found 2 ERRORS found -- end gsymcheck output You can see there are warnings about the pintype, the pinlabel, and the pinnumber attributes, so the symbol isn't correct. Common symbols like resistors, diodes, capacitors and others are fixed in CVS. I told you to update your symbols using the ones in CVS. I don't know exactly your configuration, but I think you didn't do it properly. Let me explain: If you were using geda packages for your distribution, the symbols are usually in /usr/share/gEDA/sym/, or /usr/local/share/gEDA/sym. You have to overwrite those symbols with the ones you get from CVS. The CVS is configured to install all stuff at ~/geda/ . So if you checkout from CVS, and do just 'make install', you are not going to overwrite the symbols inside your package: all symbols will be installed under ~/geda/share/gEDA/sym. I know you are still using old symbols because when I run gnetlist -g drc2 powersupply2.sch -o drc_out.txt, I got some warnings like: WARNING: Symbol version mismatch on refdes C2 (capacitor-1.sym): Symbol in library is newer than instantiated symbol This means that the symbol in my library (the CVS version) is newer than the one you used when you created the schematic. Now if I run gnetlist -g drc2 powersupply2.sch -o drc_out.txt, I get (I will not show the warnings about newer symbols in the library): begin of drc2 output Checking non-numbered parts... Checking duplicated references... Checking nets with only one connection... Checking type of pins connected to a net... ERROR: unknown: U1:1 connected to totem-pole: R1:3 Z1:2 ERROR: unknown: U1:3 connected to totem-pole: C6:1 C5:1 ERROR: unknown: U1:2 connected to totem-pole: C1:2 T1:3 D2:1 D3:1 D5:1 C6:2 C5:2 R1:2 Z1:1 C4:1 C3:2 C2:1 Checking unconnected pins... Checking slots... Checking duplicated slots... Checking unused slots... No warnings found. Found 3 errors. ERROR: DRC errors found. See output file. - end of drc2 output As you see, there are only 3 errors. All of them are the same kind of error, each one related to one pin of U1. Let's see one of them, and I hope you will understand the others: ERROR: unknown: U1:1 connected to totem-pole: R1:3 Z1:2 uh! you found a bug! it should be: ERROR: unknown: U1:1 connected to passive: R1:3 Z1:2 I fixed this error in CVS (file geda/devel/gnetlist/scheme/gnet-drc2.scm), and also changed the error/warning message to something more self explaining. Check it out and try it!. This means that the pin 1 of U1 (U1:1) has a 'unknown' pintype, and is connected to pin 3 of R1 (R1:3) and pin 2 of Z1 (Z1:2). As I said before, any connection to an 'unknown' pintype is reported as an error by the drc2 backend. The new message is: ERROR: Pin(s) with pintype 'unknown': U1:1 are connected to pin(s) with pintype 'passive': R1:3 Z1:2 The right way to go now would
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie (symbols)
Hi Marc, if you haven't installed geda before, then it's fine (for the symbols). You should do the same with gschem, gnetlist and all geda apps. One easy way is going to geda/devel, editing the Makefile, and changing: prefix=$(HOME)/geda to: prefix=/usr Then doing 'make install'. However, I prefer not doing that, and installing all stuff at ~/geda: just go to geda/devel and do 'make', set the environment variables as shown in the message, and then do a 'make install'. Notice that you will need setting the environment variables after opening a terminal window, each time you want to run any geda application (only once per terminal). Regards, Carlos El sáb, 07-01-2006 a las 22:51 +, Marc escribió: Carlos i get it now nice explanation what ive been waiting for :) when i configured the geda symbols for Gentoo i did BusyBox64 geda-symbols-20050820 # ./Configure --prefix=/usr ** Configuration summary for geda-symbols 20050820: data directory: /usr/share/gEDA rc directory: /usr/share/gEDA documentation directory: /usr/share/doc/geda-doc mingw build: no make install example output: /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 or3-1.sym /usr/share/gEDA/sym/vhdl/or3-1.sym /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 or4-1.sym /usr/share/gEDA/sym/vhdl/or4-1.sym /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 or5-1.sym /usr/share/gEDA/sym/vhdl/or5-1.sym /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 or6-1.sym /usr/share/gEDA/sym/vhdl/or6-1.sym /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 or7-1.sym /usr/share/gEDA/sym/vhdl/or7-1.sym /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 or8-1.sym /usr/share/gEDA/sym/vhdl/or8-1.sym /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 or9-1.sym /usr/share/gEDA/sym/vhdl/or9-1.sym This is what i did is it right? Marc :) -- Carlos Nieves Ónega [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Friday 06 January 2006 11:21 pm, DJ Delorie wrote: 120VAC into a 25v electrolytic. Poof! Out goes the magic smoke. 120VAC, or 400VDC (worked better) in to a Slim Jim (the kind you eat) gives *THICK* white smoke, and a kind of greasy ooze all over the lab bench. Fun at VoTech, years ago, to answer the question What do you do with with, 500 Slim Jim's?, you can only eat so many...
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
I also use Gentoo on AMD64. I strongly recommend building from the tarballs on the gEDA site. I had lots of trouble with the gentoo package. On Jan 7, 2006, at 4:32 PM, Marc wrote: Carlos do you think i would be better off doing emerge --unmerge geda-suite on gentoo and reinstalling from scratch with the apps from the geda site i am on AMD64 id have to install manually. Marc :) John Doty Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Jan 7, 2006, at 2:11 PM, Marc wrote: John Im running out of errors now i got rid of the LED error i attached 200 ohms value to it and the gnd error is gone too what a valid value for an inductor i wonder . I don't know. What is it? D6 0 6 200 SPICE will think this is a diode whose model is named 200. D4 4 0 ln4007 D3 1 4 ln4007 Need a model named ln4007 Z1 0 1 bzx55c Zener? Needs to be Dsomething. And you need a bzx55c model. Note that there are no subcircuits or models distributed with gEDA. They are generally the intellectual property of the manufacturer, so you have to go and find them. This is much too complex a circuit to be your first SPICE sim. I suggest starting much smaller. Seriously consider verifying that resistors follow Ohm's law for your first try (no, I am not trying to insult you: SPICE is *hard* to use). John Doty Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Saturday 07 January 2006 02:43 pm, Marc wrote: what about the other 21 errors Sighs geda aint very productive for me at the moment im seriously thinking about dumping geda and getting another pc to run windows. all i want to do i dump components onscreen join them up give it a value and run a sim Try oregano and gnucap. This combo is more newbie friendly than geda, and it is still free/open-source. GPL. I agree that geda is not appropriate for the beginner. I wish I could recommend it to beginners, but there are too many little things that experienced people can work around, that are show-stoppers for beginners. gnucap is more newbie friendly than spice. It lets you play with the circuit. You can ask for help here, or the gnucap help email list. It is linked to the geda web page, or you can go to http://www.gnucap.org. The home page, in Spanish, for oregano is http://arrakis.gforge.lug.fi.uba.ar/ I am not aware of one in English. Oregano is a lightweight compared to geda in its features, but it is easier to use and that is what you want now. This combo is still not as mature as the commercial offerings, but I think it will do what you want. I understand your frustration. Everyone goes through it.
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Saturday 07 January 2006 06:50 pm, John Doty wrote: This is much too complex a circuit to be your first SPICE sim. I suggest starting much smaller. Seriously consider verifying that resistors follow Ohm's law for your first try (no, I am not trying to insult you: SPICE is *hard* to use). I think Marc's professor has a problem. Gnucap is much easier to start on than any Spice, and takes the same netlists, so you see some of the same issues less painfully. I am guessing that Marc is a student, studying EE in college, and is taking a course that might be called something like electronics-1, and is just now getting to power supply circuits. I'm also guessing that his teacher doesn't know simulation very well, and Marc wants to know more than his professor is giving him. I try to introduce simulation early, when topics like Ohm's law and Kirchoff's laws are new. When done at this time, I can introduce simulation in 10 minutes, with the netlist, and all text. Most profs that I know wait until electronics, at the diode or one-transistor level. Then they use something that hides the netlist, usually the PSPICE demo. The books are written for it, and they too hide the netlist. It takes them about 3 classes to introduce it to the one transistor level, and they still can't use a netlist. Then they drop it because it is unimportant, and is considered to be a nuisance. Then later, in another course, they need to do more. They never learn that you can use the simulator to see things you can't see in the lab. Homework assignments are cut down so they fit the PSPICE demo. They still never see the netlist. At some point, they move to something like Cadence or Mentor, which has the multiple programs like gEDA. They can't run it at home, so they limit their exposure to it, struggle for days with it. It is as hard to use as gEDA. Even at this point, they still are not past what oregano and Spice 3f5 can do. Help!
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Saturday 07 January 2006 03:08 pm, Stuart Brorson wrote: I suggest you get a Windoze PC and download LTSpice from the Linear Technologies website [1]. [1] To the well-known simulation developer who e-mailed me recently about LTSpice: Sorry, but LTSpice is a wonderful simulator. And it's free (as in beer) too, which is probably all that Marc cares about. I think you are misjudging Marc. One question that tells me a lot about someone's technical and computer skills and attitude is to ask what operating system do you run on your home computer. Marc's answer is gentoo linux. Now, I will commit the evil of stereotyping here. Gentoo is a choice of people who are serious. Installation requires following a procedure several pages long. The manual talks about the many ways you can configure your system, and leads you to a truly custom system, complete with a custom kernel, and if you don't like the outcome you get enough insight to go back and change it. Then installing any package compiles it from source. It is an easy command emerge but it shows you what it is doing and lets you tweek it. Go to http://www.gentoo.org . Look at the philosophy and the social contract. That will give you an idea why someone would choose Gentoo. You are telling someone who chose this system to get a Windoze PC??
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Saturday 07 January 2006 03:08 pm, Stuart Brorson wrote: [1] To the well-known simulation developer who e-mailed me recently about LTSpice: Sorry, but LTSpice is a wonderful simulator. And it's free (as in beer) too, which is probably all that Marc cares about. I meant what I said. Every word of it. For those who missed it, here it is again: === Promoting the competition again. Closed-source freeware is our most threatening competition. Another possibility is Oregano and gnucap. This is a more integrated environment, and is still GPL. === If we can't beat LTSpice in the eyes of a newbie, we might as well shut the whole gEDA project down. We need to beat them on their terms. I believe we can, but we need to make some changes. We need to recognize our weaknesses and deal with them. In some cases, major surgery is required. We need to take the lead. We should own the beginner market. Not just be a player in it, we should OWN it. I believe we can do it. All of free technology in electronics is dependent on us. We are the ambassadors of free/open-source to EE's. When we tell newcomers to go away, to such a competitor, we admit failure. When we tell them to go to a competitor that laughs at us, we really admit failure. Oregano is a friend. It is GPL, etc... Gnucap is here. The developers are on this list, unlike NG-Spice... But LT-Spice, Eagle, the PSPICE demo, the Multi-sim demo sorry.
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
Hi -- Stuart this is more your area. I am interested too? Is there a tutorial on using gschem, gnetlist, one of the spice packages and then a wave form display package? The best we have is the documentation I pointed to here: http://archives.seul.org/geda/user/Jan-2006/msg00073.html The all about circuits website has useful info about SPICE in general: http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_5/chpt_7/index.html However having looked at Marc's circuit, I suggest -- with all kindness -- that he do a little more reading about power supply design before he gets too involved with SPICE. Then, he will need to learn more about SPICE itself too. To start off, on the circuit sidethe secondary of his transformer will be a short for 1/2 of every cycle. (Look at how D1 in his first schematic is wired across the secondary.) He also has a LED shorting the nets he thinks are the power/GND rails. On the SPICE side, well, he doesn't know it but SPICE doesn't have models for transformers. YOu need to create two inductors and then define a mutual inductance. It's not for newbies. Also, he has a Zener in the circuit -- again not a SPICE native component (although you can gin one up by playing with the .model paramters ... not for newbies. Finally, he doesn't have a GND, which is a SPICE 101 no-no. There are many other basic errors here. I suggest that Marc do a little more reading and then come back. The difficulties he is experiencing are not due to gEDA being hard to use, but are rather because he needs a little more knowledge. I suggest he go out and buy The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill, which is a most excellent introduction to electronics. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521370957/qid=1136572727/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-3632161-7873654?n=507846s=booksv=glance Looking forward to hearing from Marc again after reading Horowitz and Hill, Stuart
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
Ok if we are going to recomend a reading list I would suggest Power
Supplies Projects for the Hobbyist and Technician by David Lines ISBN
0-7906-1120-1 Master Publishing, Inc
I took the liberty to redraw the origional schematic and then a couple
of modified versions of it. None of which I would use to build a real
power supply from, but hopefully educationaly usefull.
Steve Meier
v 20050313 1
C 61400 46700 1 90 0 capacitor-1.sym
{
T 61100 46700 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=C2
}
C 62500 46700 1 90 0 capacitor-1.sym
{
T 62200 46800 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=C4
}
C 66600 47100 1 270 0 capacitor-2.sym
{
T 66700 46200 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=C5
}
C 62000 47600 1 90 1 capacitor-2.sym
{
T 61700 47000 5 10 1 1 90 6 1
refdes=C3
}
C 63000 46700 1 270 0 led-2.sym
{
T 63300 46700 5 10 1 1 270 0 1
refdes=D5
}
C 64700 46800 1 0 0 lm7815-1.sym
{
T 66100 47800 5 10 1 1 0 6 1
refdes=U1
}
C 64700 46200 1 90 0 zener-2.sym
{
T 64400 46500 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=Z1
}
C 63800 46900 1 270 1 resistor-variable-2.sym
{
T 64200 47450 5 10 1 1 90 2 1
refdes=R1
}
C 59900 46800 1 90 0 diode-1.sym
{
T 59400 47100 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=D3
}
C 59900 45500 1 90 0 diode-1.sym
{
T 59400 45800 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=D4
}
C 59000 45500 1 90 0 diode-1.sym
{
T 58500 45800 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=D1
}
C 59000 46800 1 90 0 diode-1.sym
{
T 58500 47100 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=D2
}
C 67700 46200 1 90 0 capacitor-1.sym
{
T 67400 46300 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=C6
}
C 56600 45400 1 0 0 transformer-1.sym
{
T 56900 46700 5 10 1 1 0 0 1
refdes=T1
}
C 56600 45600 1 90 0 voltage-1.sym
{
T 56100 45900 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=V1
}
N 56400 46500 56600 46500 4
N 56400 45600 56400 45500 4
N 56400 45500 56600 45500 4
C 60400 47600 1 270 0 capacitor-2.sym
{
T 60500 46800 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=C1
}
N 58800 46800 58800 46400 4
N 58100 46500 58800 46500 4
N 58100 45500 58100 45200 4
N 58800 45200 58800 45500 4
N 59700 45200 59700 45500 4
N 59700 46400 59700 46800 4
N 58800 47700 58800 48000 4
N 59700 48000 59700 47700 4
N 58800 48000 63900 48000 4
N 63900 48000 63900 47800 4
N 63100 46700 63100 48000 4
N 62300 47600 62300 48000 4
N 61800 47600 61800 48000 4
N 61200 47600 61200 48000 4
N 60600 47600 60600 48000 4
N 60600 45200 60600 46700 4
N 61200 45200 61200 46700 4
N 61800 45200 61800 46700 4
N 62300 45200 62300 46700 4
N 58100 45200 69000 45200 4
N 63100 45200 63100 45800 4
N 63900 46900 63900 45200 4
N 64700 47400 64400 47400 4
N 64600 47000 64600 47400 4
N 64600 46200 64600 45200 4
N 65500 46800 65500 45200 4
N 66800 46200 66800 45200 4
N 67500 46200 67500 45200 4
N 66300 47400 69000 47400 4
N 66800 47100 66800 47400 4
N 67500 47100 67500 47400 4
C 63600 44600 1 0 0 gnd-1.sym
N 63700 44900 63700 45200 4
T 60100 44600 9 10 1 0 180 0 1
D1 is on only when Va is less then ground
T 59000 46500 9 10 1 0 0 0 1
Va
T 59100 48200 9 10 1 0 0 0 1
Vb
T 68200 47500 9 10 1 0 0 0 1
Vout
T 62000 44300 9 10 1 0 180 0 1
D2 is on when Va is greater Vb by the voltage drop of one diode
T 56500 43400 9 10 1 0 0 0 1
Vb at most is 1 diode drop bellow Va
C 61100 41200 1 90 0 capacitor-1.sym
{
T 60800 41200 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=C2
}
C 62200 41200 1 90 0 capacitor-1.sym
{
T 61900 41300 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=C4
}
C 66300 41600 1 270 0 capacitor-2.sym
{
T 66400 40700 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=C5
}
C 61700 42100 1 90 1 capacitor-2.sym
{
T 61400 41500 5 10 1 1 90 6 1
refdes=C3
}
C 62700 41200 1 270 0 led-2.sym
{
T 63000 41200 5 10 1 1 270 0 1
refdes=D5
}
C 64400 41300 1 0 0 lm7815-1.sym
{
T 65800 42300 5 10 1 1 0 6 1
refdes=U1
}
C 64400 40700 1 90 0 zener-2.sym
{
T 64100 41000 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=Z1
}
C 63500 41400 1 270 1 resistor-variable-2.sym
{
T 63900 41950 5 10 1 1 90 2 1
refdes=R1
}
C 67400 40700 1 90 0 capacitor-1.sym
{
T 67100 40800 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=C6
}
C 56000 40100 1 0 0 transformer-1.sym
{
T 56300 41400 5 10 1 1 0 0 1
refdes=T1
}
C 56000 40300 1 90 0 voltage-1.sym
{
T 55500 40600 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=V1
}
N 55800 41200 56000 41200 4
N 55800 40300 55800 40200 4
N 55800 40200 56000 40200 4
C 60100 42100 1 270 0 capacitor-2.sym
{
T 60200 41300 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=C1
}
N 57500 41200 59400 41200 4
N 57500 40200 57500 41000 4
C 62900 41500 1 90 0 resistor-1.sym
{
T 62600 41700 5 10 1 1 90 0 1
refdes=R2
}
N 58500 42500 63600 42500 4
N 63600 42500 63600 42300 4
N 62800 42400 62800 42500 4
N 62000 42100 62000 42500 4
N 61500 42100 61500 42500 4
N 60900 42100 60900 42500 4
N 60300 42100 60300 42500 4
N 60300 39700 60300 41200 4
N 60900 39700 60900 41200 4
N 61500 39700 61500 41200 4
N 62000 39700 62000 41200 4
N 58500 39700 68700 39700 4
N 62800 39700 62800 40300 4
N 62800 41200 62800 41500 4
N 63600 41400 63600 39700 4
N 64400 41900 64100 41900 4
N 64300 41500 64300 41900 4
N 64300 40700 64300 39700 4
N 65200 41300 65200 39700 4
N 66500 40700 66500 39700 4
N 67200 40700 67200 39700 4
N 66000 41900 68700 41900 4
N 66500 41600 66500 41900 4
N 67200 41600 67200 41900 4
C 63300 39100 1 0 0 gnd-1.sym
N 63400 39400 63400 39700 4
T 58800 42700 9 10 1 0 0 0 1
Vb
T 67900 42000 9 10 1 0 0 0 1
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Jan 6, 2006, at 9:42 PM, Marc wrote: I just bought The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill An excellent book. I have a Tesla Coil/Tesla Amplifier which i am building already got a large Variac and 2 x 70KV 0.01mfd rapid discharge capacitors apparently from a Laser. Good lord, man. High voltage and capacitors are a very dangerous combination. Please be careful. But that does sound like fun. ;) -Dave -- Dave McGuireYou'll have to be a lot more specific than 'that Cape Coral, FL girl last night.'-Ted McFadden
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Jan 6, 2006, at 9:48 PM, Marc wrote: already destroyed 1 plasma globe turned ceramic to glass and done the floor too just using a microwave transformer :D Hey, umm...when you electrocute yourself, can I have your CDs? ;) Seriously though...if you're not afraid of high voltage, don't mess with high voltage. Just keep in mind that it can be quite lethal. -Dave -- Dave McGuireYou'll have to be a lot more specific than 'that Cape Coral, FL girl last night.'-Ted McFadden
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
The other thing that bothers me about this power supply is how does adjusting the input voltage via a voltage divider affect the regulated output? I don't think that is going to work at all. Yep look at the data sheet http://www.fairchildsemi.com/ds/LM/LM7815.pdf If you want to adjust the output voltage you do it through the 7815's ground pin. See figure 11 Page 19. Steve Meier Steve Meier wrote: Ok if we are going to recomend a reading list I would suggest Power Supplies Projects for the Hobbyist and Technician by David Lines ISBN 0-7906-1120-1 Master Publishing, Inc I took the liberty to redraw the origional schematic and then a couple of modified versions of it. None of which I would use to build a real power supply from, but hopefully educationaly usefull. Steve Meier
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Jan 6, 2006, at 11:06 PM, DJ Delorie wrote: High voltage and capacitors are a very dangerous combination. My experience is that high voltage plus capacitors yields green smoke. Then you're either using the wrong capacitors or the right capacitors, depending on the desired result. ;) -Dave -- Dave McGuireYou'll have to be a lot more specific than 'that Cape Coral, FL girl last night.'-Ted McFadden
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Jan 6, 2006, at 11:21 PM, DJ Delorie wrote: My experience is that high voltage plus capacitors yields green smoke. Then you're either using the wrong capacitors or the right capacitors, depending on the desired result. ;) We were young. They were the right capacitors :-) 120VAC into a 25v electrolytic. Poof! Out goes the magic smoke. I have a hazy memory involving a large DC power supply and a box of electrolytics...and vodka. That was quite the geeky party. -Dave -- Dave McGuireYou'll have to be a lot more specific than 'that Cape Coral, FL girl last night.'-Ted McFadden
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Friday 06 January 2006 23:22, Dave McGuire wrote: On Jan 6, 2006, at 11:21 PM, DJ Delorie wrote: My experience is that high voltage plus capacitors yields green smoke. Then you're either using the wrong capacitors or the right capacitors, depending on the desired result. ;) We were young. They were the right capacitors :-) 120VAC into a 25v electrolytic. Poof! Out goes the magic smoke. I have a hazy memory involving a large DC power supply and a box of electrolytics...and vodka. That was quite the geeky party. -Dave And I recall one evening back in the very early 70's when I was sitting at the kitchen table about 11 pm testing an old tube type CB radio that I was redoing the jumpers in to convert it for 12 volt operation. Unforch, the one pair of jumpers I missed on the schematic had left the vibrator (remember those?) and plate transformer still wired for 6 volts. The radio worked great on 12 volts, until one of the filter cans made a dent about 1/2 deep in the plaster ceiling. The kids, trying to get some sleep upstairs, thought I was shooting at them. Messy, took a couple of hours to clean that up. Stinky too. Probably had over 600 volts on 450 volt rated caps. -- Dave McGuireYou'll have to be a lot more specific than 'that Cape Coral, FL girl last night.'-Ted McFadden -- Cheers, Gene People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word 'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
Unforch, the one pair of jumpers I missed on the schematic had left the vibrator (remember those?) and plate transformer still wired for 6 volts. The radio worked great on 12 volts, until one of the filter cans made a dent about 1/2 deep in the plaster ceiling. The kids, trying to get some sleep upstairs, thought I was shooting at them. Messy, took a couple of hours to clean that up. Stinky too. Probably had over 600 volts on 450 volt rated caps. funny. In my case it was my parents who thought I was up to no good when I made a very loud bang at 2AM back in high school days. And yes, those caps do stink. Probably nasty stuff for human consumption too. -Dan
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Jan 6, 2006, at 11:52 PM, Dan McMahill wrote: funny. In my case it was my parents who thought I was up to no good when I made a very loud bang at 2AM back in high school days. And yes, those caps do stink. Probably nasty stuff for human consumption too. I remember having read somewhere that capacitor electrolyte, especially the stuff found in wet paper electrolytics, is quite nasty. Whenever we were cooking them off, I'd always keep a hand over my drink. =) -Dave -- Dave McGuireYou'll have to be a lot more specific than 'that Cape Coral, FL girl last night.'-Ted McFadden
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
And I recall one evening back in the very early 70's when I was sitting at the kitchen table about 11 pm testing an old tube type CB radio that I was redoing the jumpers in to convert it for 12 volt operation. Unforch, the one pair of jumpers I missed on the schematic had left the vibrator (remember those?) and plate transformer still wired for 6 volts. The radio worked great on 12 volts, until one of the filter cans made a dent about 1/2 deep in the plaster ceiling. The kids, trying to get some sleep upstairs, thought I was shooting at them. Messy, took a couple of hours to clean that up. Stinky too. Probably had over 600 volts on 450 volt rated caps. I remember once I was repairing a line printer. This was not like the typical desktop printer of today. It was big, and heavy, and noisy. It stood on the floor and was about as tall as a person. I was investigating why one of the hammers was not firing. My memory is unclear about what happened right before the explosion. People said it sounded like a shotgun from down the hall. The whole room was filled with horrid tasting smoke. And one of the large electrolytic capacitors about the size of a can of coke had pretty much disappeared. Well not exactly. It took me an hour to vacuum the mess out of the inside of the printer.
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
A few years ago our VCR died. I opens it up and checks the fuses, one is blown. No problem, I know how to replace a fuse. Power it up again, let the smoke out of one of the transistors. Ok, now we know what the fuse was protecting.
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Jan 7, 2006, at 12:01 AM, Bert Douglas wrote: I remember once I was repairing a line printer. This was not like the typical desktop printer of today. It was big, and heavy, and noisy. It stood on the floor and was about as tall as a person. I was investigating why one of the hammers was not firing. My memory is unclear about what happened right before the explosion. People said it sounded like a shotgun from down the hall. The whole room was filled with horrid tasting smoke. And one of the large electrolytic capacitors about the size of a can of coke had pretty much disappeared. Well not exactly. It took me an hour to vacuum the mess out of the inside of the printer. It's amusing when big paper electrolytics blow. I've seen one blow a long streamer straight up in the air like a party popper. And yes that stuff sure does stink! -Dave -- Dave McGuireYou'll have to be a lot more specific than 'that Cape Coral, FL girl last night.'-Ted McFadden
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
On Friday 06 January 2006 23:52, Dan McMahill wrote: Unforch, the one pair of jumpers I missed on the schematic had left the vibrator (remember those?) and plate transformer still wired for 6 volts. The radio worked great on 12 volts, until one of the filter cans made a dent about 1/2 deep in the plaster ceiling. The kids, trying to get some sleep upstairs, thought I was shooting at them. Messy, took a couple of hours to clean that up. Stinky too. Probably had over 600 volts on 450 volt rated caps. funny. In my case it was my parents who thought I was up to no good when I made a very loud bang at 2AM back in high school days. And yes, those caps do stink. Probably nasty stuff for human consumption too. Sort of, but we know better than to ingest it while your pets think is sweet and lap it up, leading to death a goodly portion of the time. The stink is the combination of burnt kraft paper used to seperate the foils, and the common anti-freeze ethylene glycol's burning byproducts. The same stuff you can smell behind an automobile with a cracked head or head gasket. The 'technical grade' of ethylene glycol used in electrolytic caps is many times purer than the stuff used in auto radiators though. Back in the mid-70's when the petro squeeze was on the first time, antifreeze that winter was up into the $13 a gallon area, and I created a nationwide semi-shortage of electrolytic caps that winter by running down the last barrel of the good stuff in the country (it was only 125 miles away, on the Mobil warehouses dock in Omaha at the time) and buying it for a water cooled tv transmitter which required the pure stuff else a pair of $150,000 klystrons could be trashed by the internal electralisis the regular stuff would have allowed. It was that, or sign off KNXE-TV for the winter. As it was destined for another customer, I had to talk fast to get it. As the original customer probably had a fixed price contract, they probably welcomed the chance to get what the traffic would bear. ISTR the PO I cut in NETV's name was for about 850-900 dollars for that 55 gallon drum. ISTR that barrel was sitting there waiting for shipping orders to Sprague, who had a plant in eastern Nebraska at the time. 55 gallons of it will make a heck of a lot of electrolytic caps as it only takes a few drops to soak the paper sufficiently. -Dan -- Cheers, Gene People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word 'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
You're HURTING ME here! ;) -Dave On Jan 7, 2006, at 12:41 AM, Steve Meier wrote: Do I dare ask that we put a cap on this conversation? Steve M. Gene Heskett wrote: On Friday 06 January 2006 23:52, Dan McMahill wrote: Unforch, the one pair of jumpers I missed on the schematic had left the vibrator (remember those?) and plate transformer still wired for 6 volts. The radio worked great on 12 volts, until one of the filter cans made a dent about 1/2 deep in the plaster ceiling. The kids, trying to get some sleep upstairs, thought I was shooting at them. Messy, took a couple of hours to clean that up. Stinky too. Probably had over 600 volts on 450 volt rated caps. funny. In my case it was my parents who thought I was up to no good when I made a very loud bang at 2AM back in high school days. And yes, those caps do stink. Probably nasty stuff for human consumption too. Sort of, but we know better than to ingest it while your pets think is sweet and lap it up, leading to death a goodly portion of the time. The stink is the combination of burnt kraft paper used to seperate the foils, and the common anti-freeze ethylene glycol's burning byproducts. The same stuff you can smell behind an automobile with a cracked head or head gasket. The 'technical grade' of ethylene glycol used in electrolytic caps is many times purer than the stuff used in auto radiators though. Back in the mid-70's when the petro squeeze was on the first time, antifreeze that winter was up into the $13 a gallon area, and I created a nationwide semi-shortage of electrolytic caps that winter by running down the last barrel of the good stuff in the country (it was only 125 miles away, on the Mobil warehouses dock in Omaha at the time) and buying it for a water cooled tv transmitter which required the pure stuff else a pair of $150,000 klystrons could be trashed by the internal electralisis the regular stuff would have allowed. It was that, or sign off KNXE-TV for the winter. As it was destined for another customer, I had to talk fast to get it. As the original customer probably had a fixed price contract, they probably welcomed the chance to get what the traffic would bear. ISTR the PO I cut in NETV's name was for about 850-900 dollars for that 55 gallon drum. ISTR that barrel was sitting there waiting for shipping orders to Sprague, who had a plant in eastern Nebraska at the time. 55 gallons of it will make a heck of a lot of electrolytic caps as it only takes a few drops to soak the paper sufficiently. -Dan -- Dave McGuireYou'll have to be a lot more specific than 'that Cape Coral, FL girl last night.'-Ted McFadden
Re: gEDA-user: lost newbie
when i run the tools on command line directly i get even more errors 16 of them i also dont know how to add a value to the components sitting here totally lost at the moment Please post a minimal schematic and any custom symbols and then we will be able to give you some better hints. -Ales
