SPICE Labs
While I highly recommend setting up a lab as suggested by David Jones over at EEVBlog, you might find yourself in my situation where you do not 1) have the funds to set up a basic lab and 2) have space due to living in an apartment. However, everyone with a computer has access to a virtual electronics lab, namely the free SPICE circuit simulator from UC Berkeley. Whether you run Windows, Mac or Linux/BSD, there is a free version of SPICE out there for you. There are also expensice commercial packages available if you outgrow the free tools. Below are a few suggestions:
- Windows Platform
- Mac OS X Platform
If you’re currently attending a university, there is a good chance your university has HSpice on their UNIX lab machines or PSpice on the Windows lab machines. Commerical packages offer schematic input where you draw the circuit schematic, and it translates the schematic into a netlist. My tutorials will be presented in netlist form, because my primary SPICE simulators are MacSpice and HSpice, and also because all SPICE simulators accept netlist files. When MacSpice or HSpice specific commands are listed, I will document this in the netlist. The commands should have equivalents in other SPICE packages because most simulators derive from the same original SPICE program.
Labratories:
- Getting Started with MacSpice
- Getting Started with HSpice
- Multimeters I: measuring voltages
- Multimeters II: measuing current
- Multimeters III: measuring impedance
- Zener diode voltage regulator
