QEP: Porting Qucs to low cost "Pi" style single board computers

###QEP: Porting Qucs to low cost "Pi" style single board computers

Author: Mike Brinson
Status: Draft
Created: 6.1.2015

##Background to the proposal Recent improvements in the performance of 32 bit and 64 bit ARM CPU architectures and GPU chips have had a significant impact on the number, and availability, of low cost single board computing platforms which are suitable for running circuit simulation and other scientific/engineering application software. The "Raspberry Pi" is perhaps the most well known of these very low cost computing devices. Originally, developed as a device for teaching children the principles of computer coding it has also found wide acceptance as a vehicle for hardware experimentation. Unfortunately, the current B and B+ Raspberry Pi single board designs have only 500 MB RAM and a single CPU that is somewhat under powered for number crunching, making it difficult, but not impossible, to install and run Qucs on the Raspberry Pi. It is worth noting that Qucs-0.0.17 has been successfully installed on the Raspberry Pi by cross compiling the Qucs C++ code on a conventional PC. In the past the Qucs Development Team has only supported Qucs on the Linux, Microsoft Windows and the MAC operating systems. No attempt has been made to support Qucs for ARM processors. With the growing interest in applications for ARM based phones,tablets and very low cost single board devices this is a serious omission. The main aim of the Qucs enhancement outlined in this proposal is to provide Qucs users with information on how Qucs can be compiled, installed and run on low cost Linux single board computers. The single board computers and operating system chosen for this task are (1) the Banana Pi M1 and M2 boards, the Cubieboard M4 board, and (2) the Ubuntu/Lubuntu armhf version of Linux.

#Overall Aims

1. To provide Qucs users with detailed instructions on how to install, compile and run Qucs on very low cost ARM based computing platforms.

##The sequence of the work proposed

1. Initially, the work will concentrate on porting Qucs to the dual core Banana Pi board. An experimental version of Qucs 0.0.18 is now under test. Once testing is complete a report on installing and running Qucs on the Banana Pi M1 board will be posted on the Qucs web site.
2. Future ports of Qucs to ARM based boards will follow as the newer Quad core then Octa core devices become available.