As some of you know, I bought Palmtop Circuit from Design Soft a few
months
ago. Maybe you remember the problems Tamas Feher had with Design Soft
when he tried
to convince them to sell PaCi to us. But he did it - and I'm very thankful
for
that.
Design Soft sold it only because of a promise that they got abt. 10
orders (I
didn't remember the exact number). I don't know if they got all these
orders,
but I doubt it, because noone is reporting or asking about it on this
list.
So I now want to let you know my experiences with Palmtop Circuit. Maybe
this
helps some of you to decide if you want to buy it or not.
First of all let me say, i never used PSpice or another circuit analysis
program, so I'm not able to compare PaCi with one of these products.
And: I have no relation to Design Soft, so I have no interest in advertising
PaCi. The reason for that I'm writing this report is, that I remember
the long
discussions with Tamas Feher who contacted Design Soft to convince
them to sell
PaCi to us.
I want to thank Tamas for his efforts, because I now find that PaCi
is a really
great piece of software!
About PaCi:
PaCi is a software package (installed size about 800k-1M, depending
on
installation of sample files etc., cost 80 US$, if I remeber correctly,
but for
exact price please ask Tamas Feher, he is also a list member) that
lets you
design AND analyze electronic circuits with a high complexity. The
manual says
'more than 100 nodes, depending on amount of RAM' - I didn't reach
the limit by
now... ;-).
It's able to do DC, AC and transient analysis of linear and non-linear
electronic networks. The look of the drawn circuits is not as good
as probably
of the newer PSpice products, but it does its job very well.
The manual of PaCi is _extremly_ good - a short introduction, then follows
an
exercise by means of an example RLC-circuit, and after that, all the
menu items
(there are much!) are described. What's also worth to be mentioned
is that the
principles of the program are also described in the manual. You can
read there
about Laplace transformation, Fourier transformation, Fibonacci' search
method,
Gaussian elimination method for solving equation systems and much more.
Now I'll tell a little bit about the work with PaCi:
After you started PaCi, you see a screen that is similar to a drawing
software.
A grid, a menu and a status line. If you press '=', a list appears,
where you
can choose a component. Now you can move down with arrow keys or you
can press
the shortcut 'CA' to jump to the capacitor. Press enter, and the capacitor
is
shown on your work sheet. Now you can move, rotate and mirror it until
you have
it in the right position. Press enter. It is now fixed in its position
and a
window appears where you can set all parameters of the capacitor, including
a
label. Now you can press '=' again and insert the next component of
your
circuit and so on. If this is finished, you can connect all components
with
wires by pressing the space key.
Now you can analyse the circuit. For example you can let PaCi draw the
Bode
diagram. You press Menu,A,A for menu/analysis/AC analysis and then
move the
cursor to 'Bode diagram'. After pressing enter, you have to enter a
few
parameters for the diagram: frequency range, number of points to be
calculated.
If you now click on 'Calculate', the diagram will be calculated (that
takes
about 5-30 secs, depending on how much has to be calculated) and displayed.
You
can print the diagram or export as HPGL file (this can also be done
with the
circuit itself, of course!).
You can let show the Bode diagram for both amplitude and phase characteristics
of the circuit.
Of course, it's also possible to calculate the transfer function or
time
function of a circuit.
It's also possible to watch the transient behaviour of a circuit: For
example,
if you create an RLC-circuit
----[R]----[L]------
|
-
C
-
|
--------------------
and you want to know the output voltage if you switch the inoput voltage
from 0
to 1, you can do this by pressing menu/analysis/transient analysis
and set a
few parameters. If you then press 'calculate', PaCi will show you a
nice
diagram looking like this:
.
..
..
..
..
...
.....
.......
where the x-axis shows the time and the y-axis shows the output voltage.
(the
diagrams PaCi draws are much prettier than my ASCII-drawings!)
PaCi also has a built-in text editor which you can use to place text
(own
descriptions or functions created by PaCi) into the current graphic
(circuit or
diagram).
Further features I didn't use by now:
- Optimization of parameters of a circuit: You can give special parameters
the
circuit has to have and PaCi can calculate the best values for components.
- poles and zeros diagram for circuits
- built-in interpreter: it allows to define arbitrary formulas and then
draw
them on the screen. In additin to the standard mathematical functions
several
auxiliary functions and access to the component parameters of the actual
circuit are provided.
I think I now have covered the most important features of PaCi.
Knowledge base 
