Tuesday, 17 July 2007

qucs and what i am doing in it

QUCS is a universal circuit simulator written in c++. It is cross platform due to fact that it is written using the awesome qt tookit. Here you can simulate many electrical and electronic circuits. The GUI is quite intuitive.
You can have a look at the screen shot of it which shows the simulation of simple adder circuit.



There are lots of cool circuits you can simulate. You can do digital simulation too. Take a look at the examples here. They are awesome!

I got hooked up with this project somewhere in aug-2006 with small gui improvements. The vertical tabs in the sidebar was added by me which was horizontal before and which used more real estaste on screen. The adoption of my patch excited me and i slowly became the project member. Initially i did very minute improvements.
One fine day i decided to take up a big responsibilty in the project. Qucs was/is using qt3 framework for the GUI. A major updated version of qt was available(qt4). The important advantage of qt4 is that it is free even for windows unlike qt3. Also there were tons of improvement in qt4 particularly the GraphicsView framework which made application development easier and faster. I took up the responsibility of transforming the qt3 code of qucs to qt4.

Initially i started by porting small tools in qucs to qt4. Then i started with the main part sometime in december-2006. Due to exams i couldn't do much. Also i lacked the basic knowledge of qt4 and i had to learn them. Now the project is half complete. I am taking this opportunity to redesign some part of qucs for better scalability and efficiency. You can have a look at the screen shot of the progress i have made below


I am yet to do the simulator integration and plotting tool. I have also planned to introduce plugin system and other goodies. I will be achieving my targets soon. So wish me some luck!