Re: ASCII schematics from LTSpice

From: Jonathan Kirwan (jkirwan_at_easystreet.com)
Date: 09/14/04 

Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 20:33:11 GMT

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 20:50:27 +0100, andy <news4@earthsong.free-online.co.uk>
wrote:

>On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 22:08:16 +0000, Jonathan Kirwan wrote:
>
>> I've just posted up an initial web page that includes my short program for
>> converting LTSpice schematics into ASCII ones:
>>
>> http://users.easystreet.com/jkirwan/new/LTSpice.html
>>
>> The included ASCII library file has just a few symbols in it, right now. And I
>> mean __just a few__!! It has two resistor orientations, 0 and 90, two cap
>> orientations, 0 and 90, one orientation for 'npn2', one for 'voltage' and that
>> is IT! It's dead easy to add more, though, with any editor program. I'm going
>> to work on adding the fuller complement of the more common parts as time
>> permits, but I thought it was more important to put out something right now and
>> let folks look and complain and kibitz so that it can be improved quickly before
>> too much time goes into the library side of things.
>>
>> Anyway, full source is included (for those with MS VC 1.52C compiler) and there
>> is a big comment section at the top describing many details.
>>
>> Jon
>
>Is there any reason it shouldn't compile under linux?

It won't, I'm fairly sure. It uses Microsoft-specific libraries. They aren't
complex ones (for example, _strlwr() is used to lower the case of every
character in a string) but they'd need to be replaced by appropriate functions
in the gnu library.

>If not, I may have a
>go to see if it can display the results of the gschem schematic program.

Okay. Of course, you'd need to change the parsing process. How hard that will
be will depend a lot on how closely aligned the schematic semantic designs are.

>I can't read your site atm, which is why I haven't just done it.

Just try again, I suppose.

If you do take a whack at this, I'd appreciate any feedback on the source code
or the ASCII library layout. All these things are subject to change and
improvements. For example, there is no distinct "node point" designation in the
ASCII library for the parts, with special meaning. Instead, the source code
tries to do "reasonable things" when it sees a dash (-) or vertical bar (|) in
the image and matches it up with wires it sees in the schematic.

Jon