Designing Electronics with Linux

Joey Bernard — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:28:41 +0000

In many scientific disciplines, the research you may be doing is completely new. It may be so new that there isn't even any instrumentation available to make your experimental measurements. In those cases, you have no choice but to design and build your own measuring devices. Although you could build them using trial and error, having a way to model them first to see how they will behave is a much better choice—in steps oregano. With oregano, you can design your circuitry ahead of time and run simulations on it to iron out any problems you may encounter.

The first step, as always, is installing the software. Most distributions should have a package for oregano available. If you want to follow the source version, it is available at GitHub. Oregano also needs another software package to handle the actual simulation. The two packages it currently can work with are Gnucap and ngspice. Either of these two packages needs to be installed in order to do the calculations for the simulation. While this is handled automagically by your distribution's package manager, you will need to install this dependency yourself if you are building from source.

Once it's installed, you will get a blank new project when you first start up oregano (Figure 1). On the right-hand side, you should see a list of elements you can use to build your circuits. It starts up with the default library selected. This library provides all the standard electronic components you likely will want to use. But, this isn't the only library included. You can select from other libraries, such as TTL, Linear, CPU or Power Devices, among others.

Figure 1. On startup, you get a blank canvas and a parts list.

Each of these libraries contains a list of associated elements you can use in your circuits. Selecting one of the elements shows a preview of the schematic drawing of that element in the bottom window. You then can drag and drop the element onto your canvas and start building your circuit. Once you have an element on the canvas, you can double-click the element to edit its properties (Figure 2). You need to click on the "Draw wires" icon at the top of the window in order to connect the elements together into a proper circuit.

Figure 2. The property window depends on which properties are available for that element.

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