I am looking for a program, preferably for windows, that can simulate electrical circuits. I have found Yenka, but I can only get a license after business-hours. I want this program in order to simulate a relatively simple circuit, involving a NTC resistor.
Preferably free, but under 20$ dollars would do. It is just for use as a student.
I have used OrCad a fair bit.
I use it for university, it is part of many of my units.
The demo is free and is fully featured but "Limitations are in the size and complexity of the design."
I have not had any trouble with hitting these limits when I have been using the free version.
It has a large collection of libraries.
NTC resistor can be found in the Epcos library (If your download didn't come with it, it can be downloaded separately from here).
I have not used that particular library.
It does simulations, and can produce graphs and can do various calculations.
Learning to do those is non-trivial, and is beyond what I can explain here. If you do a google for "OrCad PSpice tutorial" you will get a whole pile of tutorials from various universities teaching their students how to use it. Download a few and go through them (I have done this as my own university's instructions are not the best, and/or I lost my copies of them.)
Setting up your libraries is also a thing you will have to learn to do, see here.
Like most CAD programs I feel the user experience could be a lot better. But it is several orders of magnitude more enjoyable to use than the other CAD program I have used (Cadance Virtuoso, owned by the same company now).
LTspice is another alternative, similar to the other answers here. It has a small, steep learning curve, but after a few hours you should have no problem to simulate simple circuits.
You can do DC, AC, transient analysis etc.. and offers a library with a good variety of basic components. Below are two screenshots from my installation on OSX, but it shouldn't differ a lot from the Windows equivalent.
You can use Proteus from Labcenter.
It is commercial software but with evaluation version you can create full schematic and simulate it but you can't save it.
The limitations are that it does not allow you to save, print or design your own microcontroller based designs (you can however write your own software programs to run on the existing sample design suite for evaluation), but does include all features offered by the professional system including netlist based PCB design with auto-placement, auto-routing and graph based simulation.
