ChatGPT was released late last year, and GPT4 dropped last week. These large language models (LLMs) offer some intriguing possibilities. I had a Twitter conversation about them with @alexandrosM that started like this:

So I described the simplest thing I could think of - a voltage divider - and asked ChatGPT to …

It's been nearly half a year since the big 1.0 release. This release only has a few user-facing changes:

• A KiCad PCB file can now be created directly using the generate_pcb() function instead of outputing a netlist that's imported into PCBNEW.
• Part templates can be created with the PartTmplt …

Nearly a year after 0.0.30, today marks the release of SKiDL version 1.0.0. But why assign such an exalted milestone to this release given the relative paucity of new features, most of them mundane (with the possible exception of automatic generation of schematics)?

Because I said …

Everybody wants ERC. Everybody hates ERC.

Electrical rules checking (ERC) looks for errors in how your circuit is constructed. It's like running lint, but for hardware. And as with lint, you get a whole bunch of warnings that don't matter but which obscure the ones that do.

SKiDL tries to …

Up to now, SKiDL supported hierarchy by applying the @subcircuit decorator to a Python function:

@subcircuit
def analog_average(in1, in2, avg):
    """Output the average of the two inputs."""

    # Create two 1K resistors.
    r1, r2 = 2 * Part('Device', 'R', value='1K', dest=TEMPLATE)

    # Each input connects thru a resistor to the …

FYI: The forum has moved.

I created a Github Discussions forum for SKiDL. There, you can ask questions about SKiDL and post about projects you're doing with it. This will probably be a more convenient channel for such things rather than opening issues on the SKiDL GitHub repo.

Give it …

I'm releasing version 0.0.30 of SKiDL today! It has some new features I'm excited about:

• A new @package decorator to make subcircuits act like Parts.
• A new tee() function for creating T-junctions in networks.
• Custom ERCs can now be added using the new erc_assert() function.
• Substring matching in …

Somebody asked about using XSPICE components in SPICE simulations with SKiDL. That wasn't possible since PySpice didn't really support these when I built the interface. So I added XSPICE parts to the SKiDL SPICE interface and released it as SKiDL 0.0.29.

Well, that didn't last long.

I released version 0.0.27 of SKiDL yesterday, but I didn't like having the zyc utility bundled in there because that pulls in wxpython as a requirement. That's likely to cause problems for some people when they try to install it with pip.

So …

It's been almost eleven months since I released a new version of SKiDL (not counting updates to the Github repo). So here's a new one: version 0.0.27. You can install it using pip just like all the other releases.

Check out the changes in this version here. I …