Has anyone noticed this FEM plugin?
It seems very interesting…
I just hear about in is this other attempt
that pop-up in a request for a specific function in the new API development.
I still have to give a try in some of these plugins.
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I do not need pcb voltage drop analysis so much myself. But my previous contract employer was using it for their system. If such thing is available it is good to know.
If FEA means Finite Element Analysis…what is FEM? Maybe frogs eat mice? 
… Method
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OK…Frogs Eat Method. 
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OT: check out Mairzy Doats, a novelty song from 1943.
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Have you been able to figure out what those videos demonstrate? Seems like he selects a net and then enter two different voltages on the same net? Does that make sense?
As per readme at github
simulator to plot power density and voltage on PCB geometries.
If you have multiple power sources and power sinks the voltage on your power plane won’t be V+ everywhere and your ground plane does not have 0V everywhere. This simulation can visualize the current densities and voltage drops and you will see where there are possible problems with your design. Here is a more complex analysis for example.
In Altium it’s a integrated tool.
Should be interesting, now the KiCad teams are structuring the new API, ask by a 3D viewer API? (for maybe, future transparent integration)
Yeah, I understand what the simulator is used for. What did not make sense to me was the demo that invoked the simulator. The video shows that the user enters two different values for voltage at different points on the same net. Of course, that is unknown and what the user is looking to solve? As you pointed out, I thought the purpose of the simulator was to determine the difference in voltage across the net? So, my question was, what is the purpose of the “demo” … it seems the simulation was not set up correctly to begin with?
as in the readme
This kicad plugin uses nikfemm simulator to plot power density and voltage on PCB geometries.
From the plugin you can evaluate the stress in power density.
I tested the plugin from Tobias and it seems very promising.
If someone wants to test it, I have made a PR to adding the ability to pass the boundary conditions by command line and to print voltage drop when clicking on the mesh display.
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Only if you pay for it. Actually that’s how this project started. The first version was written to be able to read Altium PCBs documents and perform some analysis there. To parse the Altium files I looked how KiCad is parsing them. After seeing the new API I decided to give it a try.
I’m pretty sure the current version is not very user friendly but it was merely a proof of concept.
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Did someone had a look in this propose
?
in Altium it is a separate plugin. Why not integrate it into Freеcad, for example?
One side is a current source and the other side is a current sink, which is known by design.
It can be a separated plugin (Python as the proposed, I just found this proposed already integrated).
For me, make more sense in KiCad instead FreeCad because this kind of simulation and KiCad integration will help the development of boards with complex tracks for supply the ICs: understand the power dissipation points, bottlenecks, warning by some ERC integration if the user inform a not usual voltage supply / current source load in a net, use the stack up defition, … As the user interface showed helps to.
Apparently it is not present in KiCad yet due cross platform dependency needs.
even in Altium it does not allow to replace a full-fledged simulator program. It does not take into account many things. It gives an approximate result where there are obvious errors. As a rough check of general rules. if you have a really complex board, then you need a suitable solution for its analysis and a regular plugin that does not take into account other parameters such as current density or frequency, then the result will be far from reality.
Anyone has news on the Nico’s work?
(discussion link here)
I’m currently working on a project to simulate long flexible circuits usable as interconnects or “smart” cables. To ease that, I created a small program that reads and extrudes data from a KiCad project via the “fcad_pcb” FreeCAD macro, slices the resulting 3D model into sections and transforms those. Currently, we have a plugin that exports rectangles on the “User 1” layer as transformation areas, writes some bending information (like the bending angle) and executes bends to bring the FPC into its final shape. But for the future, it would be awesome to have some kind of integration into KiCad