This post is part of my video blog: In The Lab With Jay Jay.

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Part 2 of this two part series is here.

In this video I begin to use LTspice for the first time. I am running this software under Wine on KDE Plasma running on Debian 12 bookworm.

This is part one of two. In the second part I will show you the answers I got from my question over on the EEVblog forum.

My first LTspice circuit is the following circuit from project 9 from the Maxitronix Sensor Robot 20, which I have code named the 20in1.

The wires, power supply, resistors, capacitors, and transistors were easy to model, but the piezo buzzer and the CdS cell were both tricky.

In the end I found the Misc/xtal.asy component to use for the piezo buzzer. I got the various parameters for it from this datasheet (I just picked that component at random, I’m not sure what actual piezo buzzer is used in the Maxitronix kit).

The answer to my question on the EEVblog included hints about how to model the CdS cell.

Armed with my new knowledge I am now prepared to make part two of this interlude, so please stand by for that.