LTspice Tutorials now available

Didn't see a notice posted to the LTspice group. Must have missed it.

I figured everyone there would know of them? Since I scarfed those off the web... MANY different places. I just googled LTspice + tutorial and came up with several more, including a couple of university lectures in PowerPoint form. ...Jim Thompson

Thank you. There's yet another LTSpice Tutorial at

Thanks, Don!

What I am observing is that most of the questions come up because the querent has never used any kind of simulator before.

So you see continual questions about subcircuits and symbols.

But it looks like some community colleges and even some universities are now offering courses in LTspice. ...Jim Thompson

LTSpice needs to be overhauled by someone to bring its adherence to UI conventions forward to 1993.

It's like something written by someone who has been living on an island since

For example, F9 for undo, what the f*ck? Ever heard of Ctrl-Z?

Yes. But it's free and very good, so I readily forgive Mike's minor eccentricities.

Cheers

I've solved such "eccentricities" by using MacroExpress to map how _I_ think into what LTspice wants. ...Jim Thompson

"The wonderful thing about standards is...." F9 has been "undo" in systems that descend from IBM's Common User Access standard, first published in about 1987. It's pretty common to this day.

See

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Keep up with WinXXX products? Please, NO! Or, Ipods? F9 is for people who are all thumbs. and have learned to 'text' people.

Sadly, touch-typing is a thing of the past. At 120 wpm, I'm still faster with command line than using a mouse to slide all over the screen!

Naaaah. F9 = rubber band mode ON, shift-F9 = rubber band mode OFF ;-)

But I solve most of the incongruity between LTspice and PSpice by mapping PSpice key-strokes to LTspice keystrokes with MacroExpress. ...Jim Thompson

I hate pull-down menus, so I create my own short-cut keys (again with MacroExpress). ...Jim Thompson

Wow! I still have to use ctrl-z to remove that irksome shift from 1/4 to tiny 1/4 in my Word Doc program.

I just discovered... duh... that LTspice Control Panel lets you set your own hot-keys... no need to use macros. ...Jim Thompson

And I found a peculiarity... you can only drag components, not wires. ...Jim Thompson

since

on DOS.

Lordy are you ever off the wall. Ctrl-Z predates MSDOS for talking about antiques.

?-)

Nope, wires drag. They do it a bit oddly, but no big worries.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

How is that done? I tried drag over a wire and it didn't drag; move to an adjacent component, it'll drag, pulling wires with it.

PSpice, click on anything to highlight, it'll drag, no special key required., however shift-F9 will allow moving with no wires dragged along.

What I need to find is a PSpice schematic to LTspice schematic converter. PSpice Schematics can run circles around any other schematic capture... even the ones costing $100K+. ...Jim Thompson

Good catch; and thanks for the pointer to that macro program.

I will look into both.

My annoyance is when you want to extend a schematic. The workspace does not quite behave as an "infinite sheet"; it shows a kind of "resistance" against growing larger to make room. In other CAD programs, you can more easily navigate in any direction away from the drawing and start drawing there.

Here is a test. Make a new drawing. Hit F2 and place a component. Now hit Space to enlarge the view so that it contains pretty much nothing but that component with just a bit of space around it.

Now hit F2 again and try to place another component somewhere reasonably far away from the existing one. If you move toward the edge, the program doesn't scroll. Or it only scrolls a tiny bit and then stops.

If you're near the edge of the view and use mouse wheel to zoom out, it zooms out in such a way that not much new area of the "world" is revealed at that edge; but rather at the opposite edge. So if you want to extend the drawing at the bottom, you have to go to the top, zoom out, and then you have extra space at the bottom.

Is there a way to just scroll through the drawing?

My fingers seem to want to just hit Shift in an empty area and drag the view around with the mouse while maintaining the same zoom level; that would be good.

Another alternative that would work would be to be able to set the size of the drawing in some dialog somewhere, and have scrollbars whenever the view doesn't show that entire size.