Use ngspice-30 for current nightlies and next releases

[Holger Vogt]

Reasons for doing so:

ngspice-30 (including its shared library) is available in all major Linux distributions
ngspice-30 shared library api is compatible to ngspice-27

Several features have been added to ngspice-30 since ngspice-27:

Offers solutions for bug reports
https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1788676
and
https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1787656

Fully compatible to PSPICE subcircuit device models that are provided by several device manufacturers for simulation of their devices

Contains a VDMOS power MOSFET model that is widely used in the (LTSPICE) community

Monte Carlo simulation is supported by several commands

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

HI Holger-

Since we do not control the packaging of KiCad, it may be better to post this as a message to the developer list.

[Nick Østergaard (nickoe)]

I consider this bug for windows packaging only. I just updated to ngspice 30 on the builder.

[Nick Østergaard (nickoe)]

Please test https://kicad-downloads.s3.cern.ch/windows/testing/patched/kicad-patched-375-6f8a0a4ee-x86_64.exe

Or the next nightly, which should include ngspice 30.

@Holger, sorry for it taking so long, but I did a very initial test ant it seems to work, so hopefully everything should be good. I you can verify it is good, I may run a rebuild of the stable build such that we can have the latest ngspice there as well.

[Nick Østergaard (nickoe)]

Be aware that some exes are not included because they are not included in the ngspice 30 msys2 package.

I don't really know what they are used for:
ngproc2mod.exe
ngsconvert.exe
ngmakeidx.exe
ngmultidec.exe
ngnutmeg.exe

[Nick Østergaard (nickoe)]

Available in the current nightlies:
kicad-r13375.6f8a0a4ee-i686.exe
kicad-r13375.6f8a0a4ee-x86_64.exe

[Holger Vogt (h+vogt)]

If have done some preliminary tests. All look good.

I will do some more during the weekend.

The executables mentioned are old, now useless stuff, and therefore are excluded from the standard ngspice build, but may be retrieved by adding the configure flag --enable-oldapps.

[Nick Østergaard (nickoe)]

I have pushed it for 5.1.2 as well as pkgrel 2.

https://kicad-downloads.s3.cern.ch/windows/stable/kicad-5.1.2_2-x86_64.exe

[Holger Vogt (h+vogt)]

Some more tests with ngspice-30 in kicad-5.1-jenkins-298-x86_64.exe (about 20 different circuits). Everything is o.k.

Thanks for adding ngspice-30.

[Holger Vogt (h+vogt)]

pkgrel 2

Nick, does that mean that macOS nightlies and 5.1.2 stable now also offer ngspice-30? There was a user request at https://forum.kicad.info/t/kicad-and-simulation/17383/4.

[Nick Østergaard (nickoe)]

@Holger, I am not sure with the macos build. I have not followed it tightly this round, but given this pull request it looks like uses ngspice 31.3

https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-mac-builder/pull/302