hi all,
after thinking a bit about the recent discussion re: electric circuits in software, id like to share an idea and ask for help as well:
there is an fine, open-sourced circuit emulator available: http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/
my idea is to implement ngspice as a pd object, or, on the long run, as a set of objects representing the parts. for a start i think it would be sufficient to have a single object that loads a netlist. that netlist has to be generated in en external tool, preferably from the gEDA suite http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/apps/geda/
after that it would be great to split up the rather big ngspice package into serveral objects, and eventually integrating a way to use a pd patch as a netlist source for it. that way, a circuit could be drawn as kind of subpatch.
altough i have no idea yet about the performance, it should be possible to run simpler circuits like oscillators and filter in realtime pretty well. and i mean in a way that it can be used in a performance, and not just "runs, but takes 90% cpu" .... ;)
also i think that for the purpose of making it a pd object, some things could be simplified regarding the math to calculate the net's. any math-heads around that like to help with that? trading accuracy for speed, in this case.
what do you think? anyone like to participate in such a project? for me alone that would be bit to much right now, but i think it would be a nice thing to be able to emulate real synth/filter/etc. circuits in pd and mix that with the realtime audio capabilities ....
greets,
chris