Initialization of ngspice on OSX

[Jonatan Liljedahl]

On OSX, the installed bundle does not include the necessary codemodels and init files for ngspice, so even though libngspice is bundled, one must also install ngspice separately. This might be OK in itself, but the problem is that kicad (or the bundled libngspice?) does not know where ngspice is installed, so it does not find the needed files. A workaround is to start kicad from the terminal and set an environment variable like this:

$ export SPICE_LIB_DIR=/Applications/ngspice/share/ngspice/
$ /Applications/Kicad/kicad.app/Contents/MacOS/kicad

This is not very user friendly.. ;)

[Jonatan Liljedahl (kymatica)]

Here's another workaround, that is a lot simpler. Add the following to your spice text block in the schematic:

.control
pre_set noaskquit
pre_set nomoremode
pre_codemodel /Applications/ngspice/lib/ngspice/spice2poly.cm
pre_codemodel /Applications/ngspice/lib/ngspice/analog.cm
pre_codemodel /Applications/ngspice/lib/ngspice/digital.cm
pre_codemodel /Applications/ngspice/lib/ngspice/xtradev.cm
pre_codemodel /Applications/ngspice/lib/ngspice/xtraevt.cm
.endc

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

Fixed in revision af3d5befa7786e43ec535983f1cde45f96d547f7
https://git.launchpad.net/kicad/patch/?id=af3d5befa7786e43ec535983f1cde45f96d547f7

[Maciej Suminski (orsonmmz)]

The bug has been reopened as ngspice is currently not bundled with KiCad.

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

@Orson, not bundled with KiCad on any platform, or just not bundled on OSX?

(Is there some legal reason behind this, or just something we haven't done yet?)

[Adam Wolf (adamwolf)]

I think it's just something we haven't done yet. (If you want to take
a look, my next generation packaging scripts-in-progress are
https://github.com/wayneandlayne/kicad-mac-builder/tree/parity. The
goal is to get them ready before V5, to help make it easier for new
macOS devs.)

On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 6:22 PM, Jeff Young <email address hidden> wrote:
> @Orson, not bundled with KiCad on any platform, or just not bundled on
> OSX?
>
> (Is there some legal reason behind this, or just something we haven't
> done yet?)
>
> --
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> Matching subscriptions: OS X KiCad bugs
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1630675
>
> Title:
> Initialization of ngspice on OSX
>
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[Maciej Suminski (orsonmmz)]

I am not sure about the current status. I think the shared library might be bundled, but perhaps the codemodel files (*.cm) are not, which will lead to errors when using complex models.

[Nick Østergaard (nickoe)]

Please test the latest builds on http://downloads.kicad-pcb.org/osx/testing/ and lets work from there. They are still highly experimental, but we need feedback on this. So please test. If you find other packaging issues, please report them on https://github.com/wayneandlayne/kicad-mac-builder/issues for now.

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

Fixed in revision 4526f40fe12eccd4579139dadda3a12c23d10d8c
https://git.launchpad.net/kicad/patch/?id=4526f40fe12eccd4579139dadda3a12c23d10d8c