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IntroductionMI-SUGAR (pronounced "my sugar") is a graphical interface for the free command-line circuit simulators SPICE and Gnucap, which come bundled with MI-SUGAR. With MI-SUGAR you can create electrical circuits, run simulations and plot the results. Although circuits can be easily created with the schematic tool you need to have a basic knowledge of SPICE to simulate the circuit. Circuits can be created either by using the schematic tool or by directly entering the circuit description in the netlist editor. Netlists are textual descriptions of electrical circuits. They list circuit elements and node numbers (or names) assigned to the connection points of the elements, thus creating a circuit topology. MI-SUGAR can convert schematics to netlist. Analysis commands and other control options, however, have to be added manually to the generated netlist. The netlist is then fed to the circuit simulator. The simulation results can be viewed in the graph plotter. You might be interested in this short-term roadmap: The 0.5.x series of releases will concentrate mainly on the schematic tool. Some of the missing features, which belong to this series are: Undo in the schematic tool, XML-based shape description for subcircuits, floating text and images in the schematic, setting convergence parameters in the info panel, and specification of analysis commands in the schematic. The 0.6.x series will mainly enhance the postprocessing stage. That is, the plotter and the export utility. I'm also planning to introduce plugin interfaces for postprocessing analysis results and for preprocessing netlists. This version of MI-SUGAR requires Mac OS X version 10.3 or newer.
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