Strange LTspice Problem

Heaven help you if you didn't create original schematic with all symbols in same folder as schematic. If you used a common symbol directory to create the schematic, and such a directory can't be duplicated on the recipient machine, you're out of luck... sort of like with Virtuoso... Sheeeesh! ...Jim Thompson

Hard coded directories? in the asc file? Try find and replace. You could always map a directory to a drive. Probably based on the DOS subst command

Cheers

This is a neat problem. IF you save a symbol and place it in a schematic. Some how it remembers to put the path of the symbol in the dropdown box in the parts picker dialog when you reopen the schematic.

Cheers

But you just gave me a clue... do a path find and replace... UltraEdit can do that easily. ...Jim Thompson

Try making a subdirectory of /lib/sym, say /lib/sym/Jim, and put your supplied symbols in there. LTspice should find them, then.

I'd do it with a symbolic link, but you're on Windows, whose filesystems don't provide such useful things, AFAIK.

There may be a way of modifying LTspice's search path, but, if there is, it's undocumented.

I was chasing a similar problem yesterday with the new OSX version of LTSpice. ASY files don't use the same search path as INC and LIB, which is a bugger because I don't want my library mixed up in the LTSpice installed files.

I used the system-call trace program "dtruss" to find all the places that it's looking for the files. Tried adding a directory under the installed directory, and was surprised to see that the contents weren't enumerated, but if the path was used, the files were found. I ended up making that as a symlink to my library instead (pity you who are on Windows).

Anyhow, syscall tracing is one way to discover the reasons behind whatever behaviour you're seeing.

Clifford Heath.

Thanks, Clifford, I'll look into that. I like my symbols and device libraries separated from my schematics... works extremely well with PSpice, and I'd like similar behavior with LTspice... this put everything in one directory is pure crap... _and_ drive-space wasting.

And the ramifications of .INCLUDE, when you have massive libraries, as I do, is not only extraordinarily bad practice, but it slo-o-o-ows the simulation. ...Jim Thompson

Maybe this can help: