PSUD (Power Supply Unit Designer)

[...]I've noticed it doesn't cope at all well with inductors under 1mH, sometimes not even then ('timestep error' is the output usually). Is this a range that can be extended easily downward ...? [...]

If there is a timestep error, it is because a voltage is increasing too quickly or a current is increasing too quickly. Normally this would happen because an inductor or capacitor is way too small compared to the other values in the circuit.

Can you give me examples of the values in your circuit that are causing an issue and I will investigate?
 
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[...] My experience with numerical calculation is that it can be quite difficult to automatically determine when adequate convergence has been reached.

Indeed and this is the Achilles heel of PSUD. It works on heuristics (that's a posh word for guessing), and over the last 19 years it has been shown to work well most of the time with the power supplies that have been through it. It does however fail, especially if the values chosen are greatly removed from what would be used in the real world.

As part of the overhaul, it will move to a new method of calculating - that's the only way to move this forward, as the limitations and inherent faults of the existing method cannot be removed.

It will either be some sort of successive approximation (hopefully convergent) method, or a sparse matrix method. Still working out some ideas on this one.
 

PRR

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I believe a *shunt* R is a useful block.

Some people try to model a whole supply-chain. (Me, I get the big-load and do the little-stuff by hand.) A Power Stage is a 5K-2K shunt load, a 12AX7 is a 270K shunt load. While you can pepper Current Loads all over, you can not do this with resistors. And most conventional tube stages are resistor-like to the power chain.
 
If we assume that incomplete convergence is the cause of some degree of Kirchoff voltage law violation, could Kirchoff provide a useful test on convergence?

Yes it would. With convergent technologies, it may never get to absolutely the "right" answer but a comparison of the results against Kirchoff et al for 99.999% accuracy would be an excellent sanity check.
 
Hi Duncan,
thank you for your great little tool, it helped me first to understand and now to take educated design choises when building PSUs.
What really is great, that it without any trouble runs in wine, the emulator available in Linux. Thank you for this!

Then, as I'm doing PSUs fpr Class A sand amps, can you reduce the existing limit for inductors? Now it's at 1mH, and as I just wanted to see the effect of a "cheap" air coil with a resistance in the range between 0,1...0,4Ohms, I needed numbers between 0,1...0,9mH. This would great, because then the users can take small coils into the design decisions.

Regards,
Matthias
 
I may be a heretic, but having spent many years programming macs and PCs I suggest not doing a mac port of PSUD3, but rather, make sure it runs under WINE. You won't be able to easily turn it into a native mac application that satisfies users used to MacOS, but if it runs under WINE, you can make a distributable stand alone mac application using Wineskin Winery.

PSUD2 runs under WINE on my mac, and I've made a usable app version using Wineskin Winery. You do still need to own and attach a usable 2 button mouse; I have yet to get PSUD2 to work with mouse emulation on my mac.

Wineskin Winery, a piece of open source software, provides a solution for most audio and electronics applications I've tried that don't have native mac versions.
 
The fact that PSUD doesn't run on a Mac means I stopped using it and exclusively use LTSPice. I don't like Wine (the application). Because I find PC's too painful after using Macs I use only software that runs on a Mac. LTSPice and Eagle serve all my needs. However, Spice is a lot more work to use when you want to run a quick sim on a power supply and I would rather use PSUD. If it were available on the Mac platform I'd pay an 'app fee' to have it. Just imagine if it would run on my ipad too!
 
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PSUD2 runs under WINE on my mac, and I've made a usable app version using Wineskin Winery. You do still need to own and attach a usable 2 button mouse; I have yet to get PSUD2 to work with mouse emulation on my mac.

Wineskin Winery, a piece of open source software, provides a solution for most audio and electronics applications I've tried that don't have native mac versions.

I'm on the mac platform. Also a bit green. Could you tell me how to implement wineskin to make PSUD run on my mac? OS 10.9.

If you can help or provide info, thanks!

-Kent
 
I've been running PSUD2 on Linux under WINE for years. Would I like a native GTK3 version? Yes. Is it necessary? No.


Two things I would find interesting.

1: I use a delay relay circuit to give "soft start" through a 300R power resistor, and the relay shorts this resistor after a time period. It would be handy to add this function.

2: User defined power frequency. I use SMPS in tube amps, and being able to calculate based on 37kHz, for instance, would be handy.

3: Sometimes I have one filter feeding two filters (say one for gain, and one for phase splitter as in the Williamson. It would be nice to model that. I've included an example.


Quite a cool program man. Thank you.
 

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I'm on the mac platform. Also a bit green. Could you tell me how to implement wineskin to make PSUD run on my mac? OS 10.9.

If you can help or provide info, thanks!

-Kent

Wineskin is a self contained windows like environment that will allow you to use many of the audio apps that are Windows only on your mac, with a caveat. You will need a 3 button mouse. Wineskin creates a stand alone double-clickable mac app.

Download the zip file of the Wineskin App from here:
Wineskin - Browse Files at SourceForge.net
Unzip it
Drag the Wineskin app to your Applications Folder
Double click it to run it.
The Dialog will show you New Engines Available.
Download the latest (currentlly 2.6) by selecting it.
Download the PSUD installer here:
PSUD2
You will end up with the file PSUD2_setup.exe in your Downloads folder

From Wineskin Winery select "Create A New Blank Wraper" and let it do its work (takes a couple of minutes, allow it to accept incoming network connections). It should come up and when done say "New wrapper (FOO) created."

Inside your Applications folder you'll find a new folder called "Wineskin". Your new App is inside that folder.

Now we need to install PSUD2.
Option-Double click on the Foo.app file.
Choose the Install Software option from the buttons
Click on the "Choose Setup Executable" button.
In the dialog, choose the PSUD2_setup.exe file in your Downloads folder.
Now you're in the windows installer and can just click all the "Next" buttons and finish installing it. The final button launches the application.

PSUD2 is now installed and you can run it by double-clicking the icon in the finder from now on. You will need a 3 button mouse (well 2 button) to make the app work properly. I haven't had it work with multi-button mouse emulation.