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Reviews For: Solve Elec

Category: Ham Software/Apps - Other than logging

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Review Summary For : Solve Elec
Reviews: 1MSRP: free
Description:
Version 2.5. Windows and Mac OS X. Electrical circuit analysis and resolution in AC and DC. Circuit drawing, values and formulas for currents and voltages, Equations verification, graphs drawing, equivalent circuits, filter analysis, frequency response graphs.
Product is in production
More Info: http://www.physicsbox.com/indexsolveelec2en.html
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
0014
WB0OEW Rating: 2009-08-22
great analysis, very limited component choices Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
I was looking for some electrical circuit analysis software and ran across this free program. I was so impressed I thought I would write up a review here. It runs on Windows and Mac OS X. This review is for the Mac version.

The good news: The program does a masterful job of easy schematic entry and editing then allows quite thorough DC and AC steady-state circuit analysis of the circuit very easily.

The bad news: the only components it supports are wires, R, L, C, a "pot", one ideal op-amp and one 3-terminal device it calls a "transistor" for which you can set the Beta gain. That's it: no transformers, no real transistors, no ICs, nothing digital, etc.

I downloaded the program, read the docs, and was drawing a toy circuit in about 15 minutes. Schematic entry is very simple and intuitive. Then there are lots of analysis tools to try. I concentrated on the AC tools. Basically you attach a voltage source across any two nodes and a voltmeter across any two nodes. From there you can get the symbolic complex transfer function; Thevinin and Norton equivalent circuits; and program the voltage source to sweep a range of frequencies to create a magnitude and phase frequency response plot.

You can also label any nodes and connect an oscilloscope to one and see what it happening at any node.

There is a very general purpose plotting function which can plot anything against anything. For example, you can plot voltage at a node versus a range of values for a capacitor. I entered a small C-L-C PI impedance matching network and was able to optimize the values of the components for the frequency range of interest.

You can save your circuit and reload later. So far as I could tell, there are no limitations even in the free version.

The program is free but the author accepts donations. Even with the severe limitations I found the program pretty useful so I sent him some bucks. Please note I have no affiliation with the software or the author in any way, I just found it quite intriguing and wanted to share my experience.

73,

Elwood, WB0OEW