Free EDA: Design and simulation with LTspice

This is the first part of a series articles about turning a circuit idea to design using only free software. EDA stands for electronic design automation and Wikipedia has a nice comparison table of software for this job.

Before drawing the schematic and designing the PCB we need a circuit idea. Then we will use the free circuit simulation software LTspice to simulate our design. This is what this article is about. LTspice is developed by Linear Technology and it runs native in Windows and Mac OS X. The Windows version runs without issues on Linux using Wine.

This is not a LTspice tutorial. For that we recommend Terry Sturtevant's and Simon Bramble's tutorials. You will also need electronics knowledge. See All About Circuits, Learn Electronics Online or Learn About Electronics.

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