PSpice Tutorial: Part 1 Introduction and DC Analysis

As the name suggests, the lab was our first foray into the wonderful world of PSpice, a simulation tool for electrical circuits. In its latest iteration, PSpice is outfitted with a cutting edge GUI which makes use simple, even for lowly ENGR 44 students!

Once the program has been installed, the first order of business was to add certain libraries which were included. The default libraries include typical beginning electrical circuit stuff and I suspect that there are advanced libraries out there with all manner of objects to be inserted into an electrical circuit.

After adding the required libraries, we then proceeded to create a new project and after navigating multiple menus, we arrived at the final dashboard for a PSpice project. The most important thing about these PSpice schematics is to be careful in drawing the wires and objects. Many people in the class got errors when trying to run their simulations (myself included) due to wiring nodes that shouldnt exist and etc. Upon successful completion of a schematic and a simulation run, the following screen should appear.

It should also be noted that PSpice REQUIRES the setting of a GROUND to compute all other values relative to that point. Once complete, the simulation should display all calculated voltages at different points in the circuit. It will also display currents!

The following HW problem was made extremely easy with the application of PSpice. Needless to say, PSpice is an invaluable tool to an electrical engineer (or student of).