Re: [Qucs-devel] Qucs, Gnucap, and Google Summer of Code

On 24/03/17 10:06, Felix Salfelder wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 09:01:39AM +0000, Richard Crozier wrote:
>> The Qucs solvers can be used as a shared library, qucsator is actually
>> just a thin wrapper for this library now.
>
> Dear Richard.
>
> yes, gnucap comes as a shared library. see main/main.cc. it essentially
> links to the library. running it will load plugins, then spawn a command
> interpreter and not much else.


>
> state space inspection is techniques that try to interfere with and
> observe a circuit while it is running (pause/analyse/modify/continue),
> as opposed to transient analysis where you try to interpret results
> *after* you ran the simulation. (once upon a time) I have implemented an
> interface plugin for gnucap, to drop-in replace an in-house simulator
> (proprietary, closed source, no-verilog-a) in a verification workflow.
> it uses sockets to communicate and it is part of gnucap-uf [2] (my
> ancient fork). unlike many other plugins i have not ported this plugin
> to mainline, and i wouldn't say it is particularly elegant. yet it might
> serve as a proof of concept for what you might need.
>

Thanks, this second one sounds a lot more like what I would be 
interested in. In my case, I want to do things like run a finite element 
simulation of an electrical machine which provides the back emf, while 
the circuit solver then does the power electronics simulation, but 
perhaps also being supplied with a control signal from matlab. In other 
cases I just want a loosely coupled electrical system simulation that 
interacts with a larger system simulation (renewable energy systems in 
my case).

This sockets scheme sounds similar to what another library I'm using 
does (MBDyn, a multibody dynamics library). Is your gnucap-uf fork 
buildable, and is there any discussion, documentation or even just code 
comments explaining how it should be used?

Richard

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