Needing more than a spark test?

[graham-xrf]

Hopefully I can get an updated version of LTSpice to work on my linux PC. The work that I did on my 7 pole filter was on an earlier PC whose motherboard failed.

On my LinuxMint, I just installed Wine from the repository, and I threw in WineTricks.
Then I fetched LTspice64.exe from --> HERE
Right-click on it, and you get to "Open with Wine Windows Program Loader"
It makes a hidden .wine folder in your home folder.
Inside that, is an artificial drive_c
No need to do anything except agree to the install.
It will fetch the very latest of all Analog Devices and Linear Technology semiconductor products that have SPICE simulation models.
and .. it runs.

Be cautioned that we sometimes have to adjust the simulation current minimums, voltage ranges, and time increments to get it to not run into never-never land. Our circuits use femtoAmps. Sometimes, you have to put a resistance across a capacitance that is "not really there", just to prevent a divide-by-zero. Use 1E18 ohms. or something ridiculous!

 

[WobblyHand]

Gee, one can still get an IFN 147, but it's $17.23. That's a problem with some of these old articles (21 years!), what was common then, may not be now.

The LTC6269 is a good choice.

 

[WobblyHand]

On my LinuxMint, I just installed Wine from the repository, and I threw in WineTricks.
Then I fetched LTspice64.exe from --> HERE
Right-click on it, and you get to "Open with Wine Windows Program Loader"
It makes a hidden .wine folder in your home folder.
Inside that, is an artificial drive_c
No need to do anything except agree to the install.
It will fetch the very latest of all Analog Devices and Linear Technology semiconductor products that have SPICE simulation models.
and .. it runs.

Be cautioned that we sometimes have to adjust the simulation current minimums, voltage ranges, and time increments to get it to not run into never-never land. Our circuits use femtoAmps. Sometimes, you have to put a resistance across a capacitance that is "not really there", just to prevent a divide-by-zero. Use 1E18 ohms. or something ridiculous!

Thanks. Seems like the installation is similar to what I did years ago. That's good.

Hmm, installed wine and winetricks. I'm not getting the option to open with wine at all. No .wine directory in home. Then I executed
$ wine LTspice64.exe. This did create the .wine directory. Seems to want wine32 which is ridiculous. And is recommending I add architecture i386 and update apt. Ack, I don't want to pull in 32 bit crap, do I? Seem to remember this from last time... apt install wine32 wants to pull in 145MB. Is this what you had to do?

$ wine LTspice64.exe
it looks like wine32 is missing, you should install it.
multiarch needs to be enabled first.  as root, please
execute "dpkg --add-architecture i386 && apt-get update &&
apt-get install wine32"
it looks like wine32 is missing, you should install it.
multiarch needs to be enabled first.  as root, please
execute "dpkg --add-architecture i386 && apt-get update &&
apt-get install wine32"
002b:err:module:__wine_process_init L"Z:\\home\\WobblyHand\\LTspice64.exe" not supported on this system

I've done Spice work before. Familiar with playing with settings, especially for very fast transient simulations. Can test your patience. Recall modeling a step recovery diode to be able to make a very short impulse.

 

[graham-xrf]

Gee, one can still get an IFN 147, but it's $17.23. That's a problem with some of these old articles (21 years!), what was common then, may not be now.

The LTC6269 is a good choice.

Would you believe a IFN147 was just a 2SK147 from Japan, slightly reworked to keep available replacements, decades ago, after production stopped? Then everybody got in on the act. You can get SMP147 from Mouser, and it does not cost 17 bucks!
You can get NSVJ3557SA3T1G, (Mouser code 863NSVJ3557SA3T1G) for £0.347. I bought 10

Regarding your adventures with Wine, That should not happen! There is something wrong. Please say you do not have a 32-bit system loaded onto a 64-bit computer! Installing Wine really should create the whole thing.

I happen to have LinuxMint (Mate edition). Right-clicking on anything brings up a list of options about what to do with it.
Like this -->

View attachment WineStart.mp4
It worked for me.

 

[whitmore]

I am trying for my circuit board right now, and getting the ADC working in a trivial way, just doing the basics.

The traditional pulse analysis uses a single-slope converter, i.e. a Wilkinson ADC; it generates a
logic output that can trigger a short o'scope digitization, and has some dead time while the
charge bleeds away. At only a few dozen counts per second, dead time won't be much of a problem;
any microcontroller-type CPU with counters completes the measurement, OR maybe that
o'scope can log a few thousand peaks for offline analysis. I dislike most of the DSO
triggers, but if you get one to work, the Wilkinson scheme is still a good
pulse stretcher/return-to-zero mechanism. A multichannel 'scope with two different gains
set will improve resolution on low-level pulses.

 

[WobblyHand]

Oh, I was wrong. 145MB of archives. 1.1GB additional disk space required for adding 32 bit stuff to my system! That's atrocious. Can this be right? For LTspice64.exe to run on wine?

 

[graham-xrf]

The traditional pulse analysis uses a single-slope converter, i.e. a Wilkinson ADC; it generates a
logic output that can trigger a short o'scope digitization, and has some dead time while the
charge bleeds away. At only a few dozen counts per second, dead time won't be much of a problem;
any microcontroller-type CPU with counters completes the measurement, OR maybe that
o'scope can log a few thousand peaks for offline analysis. I dislike most of the DSO
triggers, but if you get one to work, the Wilkinson scheme is still a good
pulse stretcher/return-to-zero mechanism. A multichannel 'scope with two different gains
set will improve resolution on low-level pulses.

Indeed, one of my circuits does use a trigger.
For the amount of radiation we can muster, the pulse rate is pretty slow. It would never strain any ADC for speed. That is not the reason we require high gain-bandwidth product stuff, nor why we try to get 20 samples across a pulse. A gain of 2 to 4 billion, and still looking at a 6uS rise time, is not so easy! The FET-augmented opamp does that. I went for a 500K gain in the first stage. You are right about the scope techniques. The trouble is, we need to end up with a gadget that measures without having a whole scope. Ideal is just a circuit board USB, or WiFi, or BlueTooth, or something, using a smartphone display.

It is the "pulse stretching" that masks the energy we are trying to represent. It's no problem if all we want to get is the count of arrivals, but the slowed down, low-pass filtered pulse loses much of the amplitude information that allows discrimination into allocating that energy into "bucket accumulator" counts. The necessary thing is to get the area under the roughly triangular pulse waveform, or some good approximation thereof, because Charge x Time integration = Energy

It may be that a stretched pulse, triggered, gated, with other incoming locked out until "reset", offered at a ADC might still have a good enough relationship to the photon electron-volts that arrived at the diode. Such was the Theremino. I was critical of, and I doubted the principle, and I did not like it! Thus, what I am trying is what makes sense to me.

Early on, I was excited about the prospect that a design like that, so simple, so easy, could deliver the kind of plots we all want. I was disappointed. Almost never has something I thought marginal in concept ever agreeably surprised me. I always want for it, and wish for it, and sometimes have my judgement temporarily clouded by it. If someone can make it do this stuff some "easier" way, I will be celebrating!

 

[graham-xrf]

Oh, I was wrong. 145MB of archives. 1.1GB additional disk space required for adding 32 bit stuff to my system! That's atrocious. Can this be right? For LTspice64.exe to run on wine?

I didn't look at what happened with mine, but would agree.
Something is still in a mess. You should not be dealing with 32-bit anything. It was called LTspice64.exe for a reason!
LTspice64.exe is 56.3MB.

My entire .wine folder is 16,667 items totalling 2GB on disk. That gives one some perspective on the other OS that runs this stuff.
Within that, the LTC program folder is 113.4MB as installed.
The parts library in that is 6881 items using 55.6MB.

Chase this down, because it does not make sense!
1.1GB is carrying something "else" with it, possibly stuff you would not want.

 

[graham-xrf]

@homebrewed
I checked out EasyEDA. Clearly it supports open source projects. I see it is web-based, so maybe not for me.
I have installed KiCad (also open source), and I am just getting used to it. It's kind of like Altium, but better.
I do agree about open source, and the facility we have from HM. Maybe we should try not to have this already infamous thread make 100 pages

 

[homebrewed]

Ah, thanks. Was replying to @homebrewed while you were posting. I'll take a look. Hopefully I can get an updated version of LTSpice to work on my linux PC. The work that I did on my 7 pole filter was on an earlier PC whose motherboard failed.

LTSpice works pretty good under Wine/Ubuntu. The only small drawback is that you have to manually update it when a new version comes out.

My main quibble with LTSpice is that it sometimes fails to converge to a solution. Sometimes changing a component value just a small amount will get it to converge so there's some funny business going on under the hood. The program usually says something like the maximum time step is too small, but I really don't believe that's the problem.