Electrical Design Simulation Software

You can try this.

GREAT ANSWER, fun and informative at the same time.

Cool, how did you do that?

hmm, not that good an answer, that isn't what he/she was looking for .. but amusing non the less.

I find 5spice to be quite adequate for my needs usually http://www.5spice.com/

A little bit of a learning curve to get the sim to run/plot but once done a few times it only takes me a minute or so to quickly put a schematic together and test it quickly. I have had good results with testing filters and so on with this.

There is a limit to the number of nodes on the the freeware version but for a few stages it works well and you can import spice librarys if required. Though I have had to edit them at times to simplify some areas for 5spice.

If you come up with something better, please post a link here, I'm up for anything new.

1- Multisim at one time offered a free, scaled-down version. I've always liked this one because it gives me graphic output that looks like real instrumentation (i.e., oscilloscope).

2- PSpice used to be available free.

3- There are a number of other free Spice simulators out there with various degrees of simplicity and graphics capabilities. Check out the various component manufacturers (especially analog devices)- although their parts libraries are generally limited to their own products, this is not a serious limitation for simple projects.

4- If you are running Linux, try gEDA or tkgate- there are others.

Spice used to be the industry standard and is available free from the net. There is a bit of a steep learning curve as it is not a "graphical" tool at all. You have to produce a node list and set up the parameters for the simulation that you want. (I may be a bit "behind the times" here.)

5spice is a graphical front end for Spice, it has a schematic editor to create the node list and then graph the results. Also can perform parametric operations on components like changing resistor values and graphing different filter responses etc.