Kicad simulator problem

[BillBard]

I’m new to Kicad. I developed a schematic and discovered it could be simulated. Great! I tried to simulate it and got a big list of errors and messages I don’t understand. I looked a tutorials and read the help files and am no smarter. Some of the are messages tell me there’s an erron line 2 of the schematic, there’s an unknown parameter, source resister not in Circuit, and finally, Run simulation aborted.
Have I missed something during the install or are there files I should have loaded?
Help and thanks,
Bill

[ABenhamouda]

I’m also new in Kicad, i have tried simulator tool and have found that in fact to get a successful simulation, we need to respect some rules, especially name of power sources and in many cases we should specify component ngspice model. For beginners, it seems to be a hard task. Simulation in Kicad isn’t yet fluent like with other simulator software.

[deragent]

Hi BillBard,

indeed simulation does not work just out of the box with every type of schematic that you have drawn!

This is, because most of the schematic symbols do not have a simulation model associated with them by default.
Also, you will need to specify the sources which will excite your circuit (for example a DC Voltage source or an AC (sinusoidal) voltage source.

For beginners, I can recommend the following blog-post to start: https://www.woolseyworkshop.com/2019/07/01/performing-a-circuit-simulation-in-kicad/
It had helped me a lot.

If you want us to help with your specific situation, I propose that you post the schematic here in this thread, so we can see what you are trying to do exactly.

Cheers

[halachal]

Yeah you shouldn’t think of kicad as having a simulator, but that kicad can act as a frontend for spice. If you have no experience with that, it’s going to be a steep learning curve. And there is no hope for simulating the vast majority of schematics.

[BlackCoffee]

I discovered Kicad (with NGspice) after the using LTspice for a couple of years. I had difficulty (like many others) so, I started my ngspice education from scratch.

I scoured the internet and compared the presentations of the info, looking for the one’s that suit my ‘getting-started’ learning style. I found several and was able to quickly move forward with success. Mind you, ‘Success’ means different things to different people.

I read the info and followed the first Three Examples in this Post and was up-and-running in a few minutes. It’s a good starting point … There are additional excellent examples to follow…