wholeboard.ngspice

Find and run ngspice, the circuit simulator, and read its results.

ngspice is used in one of three ways, whichever is found first: - the ngspice program (installed by install.sh / Homebrew / the official Windows build), - the ngspice shared library that KiCad bundles for its own simulator (run in a child process through ngspice_shared.py, so a crash cannot take WholeBoard down), - the ngspice inside the Docker image when kicad-cli itself is a Docker wrapper.

Netlists carry their own .control block that runs the analyses and writes ASCII raw files, so every engine is driven the same way: run the netlist in its folder, then read the files.

find(cfg=None)

{"kind": "exe" | "lib" | "docker", "path": ...} or None.

run(netlist, engine, timeout=120, cancel=None)

Run a netlist (with its own .control block) in its folder. Returns ngspice's output.

errors_in(output)

Lines of ngspice output that report real problems.

read_raw(path)

Read an ASCII raw file: {"plot": name, "vars": [names], "data": {name: [values]}}.

AC results keep complex values as (re, im) tuples.