Recommended Freeware Software for EEs - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / beginners

author: LoveLaika
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 24, 2021, 12:33:51 am
content: I was wondering what are the go-to free software for the various fields in electrical engineering? I was thinking about how little I know in respective fields, such as RF and the like, and I thought that perhaps playing around with some software and understanding the concepts can help me better understand it. For instance, LTspice is a good free circuit simulator for analog circuits, and KiCAD is good for PCB design. What do you guys usually go to for the various disciplines in electrical engineering?

author: Manul
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 24, 2021, 12:51:53 am
content: From free software I use Elsie (Tonne Software) for filter design and Saturn PCB Toolkit is also very useful.

author: rstofer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 24, 2021, 01:27:58 am
content: When Kirchhoff's equations get out of hand or begin to involve imaginary numbers, I reach for MATLAB or the GNU Octave workalike. MATLAB costs money, Octave is GNU licensed.I also use wxMaxima as a general purpose solver - it's also open source.One way or another, I use gfortran quite a bit. I use it under WSL Ubuntu on Win 10 machines and natively on Linux machines.www.symbolab.comhas a great online solver andwww.desmos.comis really useful for plotting functions.These are all 'math' tools, not specific to EE. Still, they are quite useful from time to time.

author: rfclown
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 24, 2021, 01:32:16 am
content: I use LTspice quite a bit, but QUCS is amazing for being free. I used ADS every day at Motorola for years. At my present job, we have one ADS license dongle for 10 engineers; I usually use QUCS to avoid the pain.Free tools that I immediately install on any new PC (not including general purpose utilities):LTspiceQUCS (similar to ADS)gerbv (Gerber Viewer)Saturn_PCB_toolkitAppCADNiVISA and Ni488.2 (while not programs, these free downloads give you the hooks to talk to almost any test equipment)VirtualBoxPuTTYCodeBlocks-mingw (for command line c compiler for Windows)Arduino IDE (mainly to install avr-gcc and avrdude)WiresharkIQCreator (because I wrote a program to snag the IQ waveforms)

author: rstofer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 24, 2021, 01:35:11 am
content: And don't forget Python. It is becoming increasingly important based upon the quality and quantity of the libraries.https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/python-for-electrical-engineers-applications-of-Python-programming-language/

author: Benta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 24, 2021, 08:58:39 pm
content: @rstofer:Thank You for the mention of GNU Octave! That one has flown completely under my radar.I installed it at once and am now playing around

author: rstofer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 24, 2021, 09:47:40 pm
content: A couple of days ago the Peanuts cartoon had an algebra problem. I initially solved it with a single line in wxMaxima but here the topic is Octave so I rewrote it. I wind up with 3 lines of codeCode:% Peanuts Cartoon% A man has 20 coins consisting of dimes and quarters% If the dimes were quarters and the quarters were dimes% he would have 90 cents more than he has now% How many dimes and quarters does he have%% 1*D + 1*Q = 20% 10*D + 25*Q + 90 = 25*D + 10*Q% or -15*D + 15*Q = -90% The matrices look like:% A = [ 1, 1% -15, 15]% B = [ 20% -90 ]A=[1,1;-15,15]B=[20;-90]A\B% The result is 13 dimes and 7 quartersI have to wonder how many über geeks spent the morning working on the problemFWIW, the solution in wxMaxima is simplyCode:solve([q+d=20,10*d+25*q+90=10*q+25*d],[q,d])