Make PSpice for TI work in conjunction with Git for Windows

I recently installed PSpice for TI (version 17.4-2020 S002 Windows SPB 64-bit edition).

After installing, Git for Windows bash no longer worked as expected. Instead of starting up in my home directory, it started up in the (emulated) root directory; and it didn't load my profile. (In other words, installing PSpice for TI broke my Git for Windows installation.)

Investigation revealed that the installation had created an environment variable HOME in my profile, with the value c:\mcci\projects\SBP_Data. It was easy enough to fix this.

• Control Panel
• System
• Advanced System Settings
• Environment Variables
• Select the variable named HOME in the "User variables" (upper panel)
• Note its value (see below if you forget)
• Select Delete.
• OK.

However, once you delete HOME, PSpice will no longer work properly -- it can't find TI libraries. Fortunately, I removed the environment variable after I'd created a working project; so it was obvious what had gone wrong.

Obviously, leaving HOME set is not satisfactory, as I use git much more often than I use PSpice.

My solution: launch PSpice from a script or from a command line. In git bash, the following works:

export HOME='c:\mcci\projects\SPB_Data' && cd "$HOME" && 'c:\tools\Cadence\PSpiceTI\tools\bin\Capture.exe' &

This can be done in a batch or cmd file, of course:

set HOME=c:\mcci\projects\SPB_Data
cd /d %HOME%
start c:\tools\Cadence\PSpiceTI\tools\bin\Capture.exe

Proper value for HOME for PSpice

If you accidentally, or in a moment of irritation, delete the PSpice-added HOME variable from your environment without writing down the value, you will have to find where the PSpice installer put the data. (This, in fact, happened to me. I needed git bash right away, and I didn't realize I'd need PSpice again soon.)

Unfortunately, I couldn't remember what the value was of the HOME directory, other than {something}\SPB_Data. I finally had to resort to using git bash:

find /c -type d -name SPB_Data

Ugly, but... it found it after a while. I was somewhat surprised by where it chose to put it, because I didn't remember specifying that during the install. I believe the SPB_Data portion is constant, but the {something} part varies based on where you chose to put the tool and your project home directory.