The third semester B.Tech Electronics and Communication Engineering programme of Kerala Technological University (KTU) has a lab course on electronic design and automation. The course aims to introduce the students to various electronic design and simulation tools like SPICE, MATLAB and HDL.
I had proposed the migration of the MATLAB section of this lab course to SCILAB, a popular open source alternative to MATLAB. The migration is now complete with support from FOSSEE . The source code of the experiments are now available here. A detailed lab manual will be made available soon.
My proposal for migrating basic electronic circuit simulation lab to the FOSS tool eSim has been approved. The source code and documentation of experiments can now be downloaded from here.
eSim is an open source EDA tool for circuit design, simulation, analysis and PCB design. eSim is developed by FOSSEE (Free and Open Source Software for Education) – an initiative of MHRD, Govt. of India. FOSSEE promotes the migration of labs in educational institutions from proprietary tools to FOSS only ones through lab migration projects.
I am really happy to have become a part of this project. You can read my previous post on eSim usage here.
I did not have much exposure to open source Electronic Design Automation tools during my graduation course in Electronics and Communication Engineering. My institute had proprietary EDA tools in the lab and all my experiences were limited to them. I must confess I never tried to explore the FOSS world for alternatives until I was in a need to offer a lab course on basic circuit simulation.
Web searches took me to the design suite eSim . It is an open source EDA tool for circuit design, simulation, analysis and PCB design. It is an integrated tool built using open source software such as KiCad and Ngspice. eSim is released under GPL. It’s GUI guides the user through the steps of schematic creation, netlist generation, PCB design and simulation. eSim source code iis hosted at: https://github.com/FOSSEE/eSim .
eSim is developed by FOSSEE (Free and Open Source Software for Education) – an initiative of MHRD, Govt. of India. FOSSEE promotes the migration of labs in educational institutions from proprietary tools to FOSS only ones through lab migration projects. The source code of lab experiments are crowd sourced from faculties and students under lab migration project. These are made available by FOSSEE under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.
My proposal for migrating the basic electronics lab to eSim is under review. There was good technical support from the eSim team during solving various experimental issues. The first version of user’s guide for carrying out the experiments proposed under this project is published here. It is under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 India Licence.This guide provides solutions to specific simulation problems using eSim. Experimental procedures are explained with screen shots.
Have a look and propose suggestions. If you have ideas on improving the contents, feel free to contribute. Git repository of user guide: https://github.com/kavyamanohar/e-design-simulation-guide
I was in need of a manual for introducing the analog communication lab experiments to students who had no prior exposure to electronic circuits or analog communication techniques. Since I found no such book which matched my needs, I planned to prepare a laboratory manual which could help students with the basic understanding of electronic circuit theory to learn and experiment the fundamentals of analog communication techniques.
The lab manual discusses different methods of implementing analog modulation and demodulation using transistors, switching IC CD4016, opamp IC 741, PLL IC CD4046, timer IC 555 etc along with passive components like IFTs(Intermediate Frequency Transformers), capacitors and resistors. Introduction of every new circuit component is associated with an appendix section which contains details from the manufacturer’s data sheet. Every experiment is explained with associated circuit diagrams, which were drawn using gEDA schematic editor. Signal waveforms associated with the experiments were simulated in octave and given along with the experiment.
The first version is released and it is available here.
Comments on improvement in conceptual clarity, diagrams, typography or language is most welcome. If you have ideas on expanding the contents with more experiments please let me know.
The github repository of the project: https://github.com/kavyamanohar/analogcommunication.
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 India License.