[Ktechlab-devel] Summary of latest IRC discussions about KTechLab

Sat May 7 19:29:52 UTC 2011

 Hi Pablo,

I'm also a student, and working on ktechlab on my spare time. This is
why I'm working on ktechlab more or less randomly. Please find more
responses inline.

2011/4/8 Pablo Daniel Pareja Obregon <parejaobregon at gmail.com>:
> Hi all,
>
> My name is Pablo, and I am the current maintainer of Caneda. From the start we
> were a very small group of developers and due to new jobs, family, etc,
> currently I'm pretty much the only one active developer left ( by now :) ).
>
> Anyway, last months I've not been very productive on Caneda either (as I'm on
> the last year of my thesis), but I intend to keep on working on it and I am
> interested in cross interaction with other EDA suites.
>

Good to hear that.

> As you mentioned, our gui is based on Qt, so interacting with your simulator
> shouldn't be difficult. In fact, the idea from the start was to create a simple
> to use front-end that could run several existing simulators as back-ends. This
> way, the user could choose between qucs/ngspice/ktechlab from the settings
> dialog according to their needs.
>

Exactly, the idea would be to use ktechlab's simulator with a
Qt-based, highly portable GUI.

> Currently I am working on a wire engine rewrite, that I think feels more
> intuitive to the user. As soon as I finish, I was going to move to the export
> netlist and simulation part using some existing simulator (for example yours).
> We could interact here, or on a whole application level (as you prefer). The
> plot system is on the works in a personal branch, and is achieved using the
> qwt plot library.
>
> As a far future idea, I think a close interaction between file formats would be
> a nice idea to work on. This work should involve as much EDA softwares as
> posible, trying to generate some kind of ODF specification, but aimed at
> electronics. This would allow the user to create for example a schematic in
> one suite and open it on any other suite without much effort.
>
> What were your ideas for cooperation? Any suggestions or comments are
> welcome...
>

The ideas are the following:

Starting with the development of version 0.4 of KTechLab, we decided
to make the application and the code more modular, by splitting the
user interface (it has been based on Qt3) and the simulator.
The simulator is being ported to Qt4, relatively easily. For user
interface, we are planning to build on KDevPlatform from KDE. This
user interface depends on parts of KDE4, so some people might not like
it.

Because of the modular structure, it would be easy to use our
simulator in Caneda. What makes KTechLab special is the fact that it
simulates the circuit in real-time, so when  something changed in a
circuit, the results can be seen immediately. Note that this requires
more integration between the simulator and the user interface. In
conclusion, our simulator runs in parallel with the user interface,
and it does not work in the classical input-process-output model.

The first step in preparing the integration could be the definition of
an interface between the simulator and Caneda, and how to load the
simulator (shared / static library?).

The idea of integrating EDA software is really good, and I think it is
really needed.

For now I'm working on porting the simulator to Qt4 and meanwhile we
could discuss how to move / share the source code of the simulator
between Caneda and KTechLab.

It seems that ktechlab-devel mailing list doesn't accept emails from
people not subscribed to it, so if you are interested, you might join.
It's really low traffic (about 10 emails/month).

 Best regards,
  Zoltan

> Regards,
> Pablo
>
> On Domingo 03 Abril 2011 17:14:09 Zoltan Padrah escribió:
>>    Hello,
>>
>> in this email I'm summarizing the discussions on IRC, related to ktechlab.
>> ( #ktechlab on freenode.net)
>>
>> The topics discussed were the following:
>> - kdevplatform API stability
>> - merging the simulator and master branches
>> - asking about possible cooperation with the Caneda project
>>
>> I'm starting to detail the last item, as it might be more interesting for
>> many people.
>>
>> Julian mentioned about the Caneda project (
>> http://sourceforge.net/projects/caneda/ ). As I've understood, they are
>> also trying to simulate circuits. Their gui is also based on Qt, just as
>> ktechlab. By a quick look at the source code, i haven't found a simulator
>> in their codebase, so they might be interested in reusing ktechlab's
>> simulator. Because both caneda, and the simulator core depends only on Qt,
>> technically integrating the two should be quite simple.
>>
>> I'm sending this email also to the project admin of Caneda.
>>
>>
>>
>> Next item: merging the simulator and the master branches
>>
>> It is useful to have all the codebase in the same tree, so it can be more
>> easily managed. Merging is not that trivial, as the source code for the
>> simulator has been re-imported to my simulator branch again, so if we want
>> to keep the git history, we need to fix the conflicts during merging. A
>> simpler solution would be to move all the simulator tree in a new
>> directory, rebase all the commits on that, and then merging should be
>> trivial. After having everything in the same tree, we can reorganize all
>> the source code.
>>
>> This needs some experimentation with git. Any tips are welcome.
>>
>>
>>
>> Finally: ktechplatform API stability
>>
>> I've tried to compile Julian's master branch, but I got compile errors.
>> The reason has been found as the different kdevplatform versions: he uses
>> version 1.2 and I have 1.0. It seems that there is no backwards
>> compatibility on the used APIs. This means that having a separate GUI from
>> the simulator core it really the way to go, as we will have less
>> version-dependent code in the project.
>>
>> In order to work around the version mismatch problem, we agreed to have
>> conditional compilation of code for various kdevplatform versions. This is
>> feasibly because it is relatively little code affected by the API changes.
>> Also the .desktop files for plugins need to be adjusted for different
>> kdevlpatform versions.
>>
>> After fixing the compilation errors, ktechlab still doesn't work on my
>> computer. By some strange reason, It doesn't load the component plugins.
>> More investigation is needed.
>>
>>
>>
>> As conclusion, the following tasks are work in progress:
>> - merging the simulator branch to master branch
>> - compiling the same code for different kdevplatform versions
>>
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>>   Zoltan
>
> --
> Ing. Pablo Daniel Pareja Obregón
>
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