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Simulating Pots with LTSpice

✇Hackaday
By: Al Williams

One of the good things about simulating circuits is that you can easily change component values trivially. In the real world, you might use a potentiometer or a pot to provide an adjustable value. However, as [Ralph] discovered, there’s no pot component in LTSpice. At first, he cobbled up a fake pot with two resistors, one representing the top terminal to the wiper, and the other one representing the wiper to the bottom terminal. Check it out in the video below.

At first, [Ralph] just set values for the two halves manually, making sure not to set either resistor to zero so as not to merge the nets. However, as you might guess, you can make the values parameters and then step them. 

By using .step you can alter one of the resistor values. Then you can use a formula to compute the other resistor since the sum of the two resistors has to add up to the pot’s total value. That is, a 10K pot will have the two resistors always add up to 10K.

Of course, you could do this without the .step and simply change one value to automatically compute both resistors if you prefer.

We’ve done our own tutorials with .step and parameters if you want a little more context. You can even use this idea to make your own custom pot component.

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