C U R V E C A P T O R --- R E A D M E ================================================ Curve Captor is a free vacuum tube modeling software that brings the advantages of modern computer simulation tools to design of vacuum tube electronics. It can build Spice-compatible models from the traced tube data (either from datasheet curves or obtained elsewhere) and do bias and loadline calculations, as well as simple waveform analysis for common gain stages. Generated non-linear models are macro-based and easily adaptable to various flavors of Spice, and are sophisticated enough to give realistic distortion figures. Simple GUI and high computational speed assist rapid development cycle. Curve Captor is designed to be portable. It is written in Tcl/Tk (GUI), standard C (numerical backend) with FFTW libraries (for distortion calculations), and uses m4 at runtime (for macro models). Curve Captor is developed under Linux and is distributed under the terms of GNU Public License. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!! W A R N I N G : Vacuum tube circuits involve LETHAL voltages. !!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ! ! ! If you electrocute yourself using this software or models, I am not ! ! responsible. I repeat, 400V is just a number for a computer program, ! ! but grounded through your body it is a LETHAL current. ! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Quick getting started guide: ============================ Included in this distribution are: README - this file curvecaptor - GUI frontend tubefit.c - numerical backend models.m4 - macro model definitions This is a source code only distribution; compile numerical backend by editing Makefile to suit your machine configuration and then running make. Edit models.m4 if your Spice distribution syntax differs from standard Spice 3F4. Install binaries (curvecaptor and tubefit) as well as models.m4 to a directory somewhere in your PATH. Run curvecaptor to start the GUI. Further progress should be described in documentation, which is non-existent at the moment. Good luck. Bug reports, patches, suggestions, flames, etc. should go to the author. Well, that's all for now... -- Andrei Frolov <frolov@cita.utoronto.ca>