[HH] circuit simulators: Qucs, Logisim

[Tom Metro]

I was looking for an easy to use circuit simulator to simulate a fairly
trivial circuit and ran across Qucs:

http://qucs.sourceforge.net/index.html

which seems pretty nice. (Runs on Linux, OS X, BSD, Windows; in the
Ubuntu repositories.) Instead of the usual procedure of using a
schematic capture tool to create a netlist, then processing that through
spice, it provides a single GUI front-end where you can both design and
analyze the circuit.

(If you're working on a big project, this approach is probably counter
productive. But more typically you'll want to simulate only a tiny
subset of a circuit, and the effort to redraw the schematic is worth the
convenience of using a more friendly tool.)

It was easy enough going through the DC simulation tutorial, but less
obvious how you use it for something a bit more dynamic. I posted a
question about that here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/qucs/forums/forum/311050/topic/6388578

It also strangely splits up the component libraries into two sections
that are accessed in rather different ways in the UI. I didn't get the
point to that and posted about that here (important to be aware of,
otherwise you'll be missing lots of components):

https://sourceforge.net/projects/qucs/forums/forum/311050/topic/6388561


In other simulator news, a Debian newsletter mentioned Logisim, "an
educational tool for designing and simulating digital logic circuits."

http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~burch/logisim/

(Qucs will do digital too, though I haven't tried that aspect.)

I didn't try this one out, but it looks really close to the logic
simulator I used in the late 80's that ran on Macs. This one is
cross-platform and written in Java. Like Qucs it is an integrated design
and simulation tool.

Logic simulators can be a fun way of capturing a bit of the feeling that
you actually built something without actually breaking out a breadboard. :-)

 -Tom