Nice to hear you going to do a conversion toll free from the limit of having to install and run eagle
like my tools has, But remember that limit’s you to 6.xxx and above of eagle files.
Apart from that and the limits on how KiCad handles free tracks and net labels in schematic files
and of of course not allowing angled text other than 90deg in lib parts.
it should be very nice, if you need any advice I will be happy give any of my knowage.
I look forward to seeing you project up on github, where I can contribute to it
I handle labels by moving them to the nearest point in the same net. There are probably some cases I have missed, but it seems to work so far.
For text, it can be rendered to polylines using one of the Hershey fonts, which is a set of public domain vector fonts. (nothing to do with chocolate )
As my program can only read the XML files, that is a limitation. Older Eagle projects need Eagle installed to convert to XML, and I’m not sure Autodesk will continue with the open format, so I see it as a complementary tool.
I mis-spoke regarding Autodesk backtracking - there are some underground patches to remove protection, possibly illegally, but not authorised by Autodesk.
I worked with https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO/tree/master/HARDWARE
try testing your software on there designs as they very interesting stuff, you will find that nearest point will fail for net’s
labels, as quite often you will have no net name’s Lables in Eagle, and will have to generate them, and place them
in the converted sch file, which of course make’s it look completely diffident. And on a complex and very tightly
spaced sch file’s that Olimex design adding extra net labels will look like a mess. Also Olimex do some interesting stuff
with there lib’s, and extracting them from sch file quite often ended up wrong, like put stuff on layers which should never
be there. And which KiCad will not be happy with. So use Olimex as your test bed, they gave me the most trouble.
Oh put your stuff up on github, then other people can test and give feed back. I found github invaluable for finding problems, as there is always some one who will find some thing your missed.
The Eagle UI has fossilized for a long time. KiCad has been tweaked to be far more consistent and logical than it used to be. Not perfect, but no CAD software is
May I ask you what is the programming language you used for the converter? Perhaps it could be converted to an eeschema plugin, so Eagle schematics could be directly opened in KiCad.
That would be a huge gain for the project, as the transition process would be smooth without involving any CLI spells. We already handle Eagle boards & footprint libraries in pcbnew, and since some time we are looking into doing the same for the schematics part.
You are welcome to join (preferably) the developer mailing list [1] or the IRC channel [2] in case you would like to discuss the opportunities.
Hi folks, I’m a new KiCAD user as of this weekend, ditching Eagle just as OP predicted.
I’m working on my first project now after having finished a tutorial. Wow, the UI is so much better than Eagle. Overall I’m thinking this is going to be great.
My only rant is in find parts/footprints. I really, really, really don’t understand why any software today would ever lack a simple keyword search to sift through 4800+ parts. A wimpy single letter tap to jump to a point in a list of 4800 items is extremely pathetic, to put it nicely. Unless I not only know the exact part I want, AND what group or category it was bucketed into, AND know exactly how it happens to be named by this particular app (which I sure wouldn’t) start to end, I’m screwed. This is taking FOREVER trying to find footprints I need, even for a simple resistor (kazillions of choices to pick from via loooong scrollbox), etc.
Anyway, everything else IMO feels superior to Eagle. Really looking forward to getting in to this.
I had an ok time finding parts as you demonstrated with Eeschema, but a miserable time for PCB footprints. Why doesn’t “a” work for add footprint shortcut key in CvPcb? Why is the dialog so drastically different and limited? I don’t see a keyword filter in Select by Browser where you can see a preview. Consistency lacking. Seems like a huge UX issue IMHO.
The nightly build version already has a keyword search in cvpcb (The tool for assigning footprints to symbols). I bet this will be included in the next major release aswell.
has not figured a way around the problems.
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