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KiCAD has good compatibility with a very small number of file formats. It needs a LOT of long term work to expand this capabilities. There are dozens of poorly
by techdragon 5y ago
KiCAD has good compatibility with a very small number of file formats. It needs a LOT of long term work to expand this capabilities.
There are dozens of poorly documented EDA project formats and unfortunately they are usually associated with expensive software. And KiCAD has little support for many of them.
For instance I most recently came across OrCAD, yet another EDA tool I have never even heard about it before, it’s proprietary format locking away design information and thus requiring tedious and error prone reconstruction of what is otherwise a completely open design.
I’ll compare it to Blender, where the support for all but the most ludicrously esoteric formats has been developed and in many cases is still maintained. Sometimes even better than the original tools for the formats were. Blender has done an excellent job of supporting otherwise proprietary formats originally developed for and used by software with a median cost in excess of $1000USD (if not that price per year in some cases).
I don’t expect parity, I’m aware of the challenges and appreciate both the complexity and even the difficulty of getting hold of these files in the first place for reverse engineering. However to call KiCAD’s support for EDA file formats in general “excellent” feels disingenuous. It has excellent support for a few of the most popular formats and very patchy support beyond that.
- pointhi 5y agoI'm the creator of the Altium importer in KiCad, and yes, importer development is time consuming but important for people without access to those programs. I even looked into Allegro and reverse-engineered initial bits, but without access to those programs it is practically impossible to write something meaningful. At least for Allegro, you can export to Fabmaster and import it into KiCad. It's also easier to write importers for the ASCII file format than for the default binary file format, but for the former one the user needs to have access to the proprietary program to export it, which makes them unsuitable for some use-cases.
- ameminator 5y agoThe Cadence suite of EDA tools (of which OrCAD is one of) is surprisingly popular, but more for its silicon-level and SPICE simulation capabilities. So it seems to be something that should be added to the list, in terms of features for KiCAD...
- etimberg 5y agoSome of the EDA file formats are absolutely terrible. My first job out of school was building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NI_Multisim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NI_Multisim . As I recall, the file format was quite bad and I doubt anyone would be able to figure out what it meant without sitting in front of the tool, generating a file, then inspecting it.