Your particular choice may be due to past experience, ease of use, or particular features. While there are a slew of tools with advanced features which you have to pay for, luckily, there are also a variety of free versions of SPICE. It is an essential tool for every electrical engineer. If you can draw the circuit, a SPICE simulator can calculate the voltages and currents in the time or frequency domain on any node. Īn accountant has a calculator, and a hardware engineer has SPICE. If you have a favorite low-cost tool not mentioned here, add it to the comments section. Here are our suggestions for low-cost but useful tools for home engineering projects. They will never replace the professional level tools like Keysight’s ADS or Mentor’s Expedition, or Altium Designer, but they may be perfect if you want to design and build your first hobby board. Want to explore circuit simulation, or build your own circuit boards, but don’t want to commit major funds or spousal permission units (SPUs)? Now might be the ideal time to take these free tools for a test drive. We are not advocating you replace your $100k, 20 GHz bandwidth scope with one of our recommended 35 MHz bandwidth scopes, but if you want a simple, easy to use, yet full featured scope, with limited bandwidth, it’s hard to beat the $100 to $400 price point of some of these low-cost multi-function scopes listed below. If you are missing your engineering tools, or would like to build up your home lab, or want to finally work on that hobby electronics project you’ve put off for the last five years, or you want to introduce your kids to the thrill of measuring or simulating, now would be a good time to consider our list of free or very low-cost hardware and software simulation tools. As one of our colleagues once told us, “If I don’t touch a scope at least once a day my fingers twitch.” What’s a hardware engineer to do? We’re stuck at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, away from our normal labs and maybe not able to access some of the simulation tools we used to use regularly.
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