Anyone Get a Price on Felicitas PCBSim?

"James Morrison"  skrev i nyhetsmeldingen: lkgq3l$plp$1@cheetah.cadsoft.de

...

Nothing annoys me more than to have to fill out personal information on a

website in order to get a price for something that is off-the-shelf.

<sarcasm>Well done FELICITAS CUSTOMIZED ENGINEERING </sarcasm>.

I agree, but I doubt this is a "off the shelf" sw package. It is low volume

very specialized and hence they need to get paid to support it, so they

often maximize the profit. Actually I think very few Eagle users

need this kind of tool (but you and I do).

Has anyone received a price quote for this software?  Or even better, has

anyone actually used it?

Not me, but it looks interesting. Let me know if you find out or are able to

test it

Regards,

Hi Guys,

I'll be testing it soon, so I'll be able to give some more information

about the tool and how it works. I'm not sure about the price but I

think I heard it's somewhere in the neighborhood of $6k. Don't quote me

on that and James you'll be able to confirm or deny this.

hth,

Jorge Garcia

I realize this topic is over a year old, but here are my experiences with PCBSim as of 4 Aug, 2015:

TL;DR: Too much $$ for what is already available for free with LTSpice ULP, and lacking certain basic features (admittedly after only about 2 hours playing with PCBSim, perhaps I missed them, or they were not available in the demo).  It *might* be worthwhile in the future, but only if they can increase the usability, and offer a more reasonably-priced student version that would include non-commercial hobbyist/enthusiast/makers.  See following for details, YMMV.

I just downloaded the demo version, which is free. It *really* is a demo, limited to 20 components (although I believe their definition of components counts ICs etc as one component).  It's also limited to just NPN transistors, etc, so it's useless simulating even the smallest component-count real-world circuits.  There are other limitations as to importing/saving libraries and so on.  There is a student version available, but it's fairly highly priced for what this product seems to be delivering at this point.

I also had some issues with the output from the simulator- first, the demo circuit they provided did not produce the same result as the tutorial, despite having the same component values as compared to the screenshots in the tutorial.  I have not determined whether the actual correct behavior of the circuit should match the tutorial or my actual circuit (see below issue about now simulating with LTSpice), but this alone is enough to worry me about the quality of product/support.  I also could not figure out how to get delta measuring cursors for time domain simulation- the best I could do was drag a box between two waveform points and doing the math myself for frequency of the demo circuit oscillator.  I also think the interface is a bit clumsy compared to the EagleCAD/LTSpice interface, where you can just click on a node to measure voltage.  In PCBSim, you must select a node from a list of components in the schematic.  It was not apparent how to measure relative voltages, or currents into a node, or power.  I must admit I have not spent too much time poking around (although I have googled quite a bit), but there are basically no right-click menus or hover tooltips to guide you as in LTSpice.

Also, during installation where I already had a working EagleCAD/LTSpice connection, my eagle.scr script was overwritten, removing the LTSpice options from my toolbars and menus..  It did warn me that eagle.scr was being overwritten, and saved as eagle.bak, but it was up to me to manually repair my eagel.scr file. I am also now experiencing issues getting EagleCAD to export LTSpice networks for simulation, I am getting errors about "component spiceorder doesn't match" and so forth which I am having problems repairing.

Finally, to the price.  There is a "student" version of BASIC for 299 euros (limited to 100 components- to be fair, probably more than enough for my needs), and a "student" version of STANDARD for 499 euros.  Both seem to require a PNG of your student ID, in addition to being priced (in my opinion) out of the price range for a student.  As far as I know (I haven't actually contacted them yet), there is no "hobbyist/enthusiast/maker" license available (q.v. Fusion 360, OnShape, etc. in the 3d modeling world, both available free of charge if non-commercial, not to mention EagleCAD itself).

It's a shame, because it sounded like a good product.  It does seem to integrate pretty tightly, and perhaps a bit more seamlessly, than LTSpice.  But if they are looking to gain market share, they have not convinced me.  I'll stick with Eagle/LTSpice, even if I have to re-install both due to the havoc that PCBSim seems to have wreaked during its install.

Hi Max,

I hope you're doing well. Thank you for bringing this up again. I've

been using it for a little while now.

We'll be doing a webinar to show how it works and some of it's advanced

features. It interfaces seamlessly with EAGLE, which is pretty cool. I

think the advanced Transmission Line, Sparameter, and IBIS simulations

are what set it apart from LTSpice.

Here's the link for the webinar:

http://www.element14.com/community/events/4409

Let me know if there's anything I can do for you..

Best Regards,

Jorge Garcia

Thanks Jorge.  I agree the transmission line sim etc. are interesting- that's what drew me to it in the first place (that and its placement on CadSoft's site).  I'll definitely check out the webinar. I haven't given up on it yet!