Backwards compatibility of Pcbnew from nightlies (4.0.4 vs BZR7100+)

Software
1

I have been using a nightly build of KiCAD. I wanted to share a design with someone who is on the stable (4.0.4). When they tried to open the Pcbnew files they got the following error…

Error loading board.

KiCad was
unable to open this file, as it was created with a more recent version
than the one you are running. To open it, you’ll need to upgrade KiCad
to a more recent version.

Date of KiCad version required (or newer): 08/15/16

Full error text:

PARSE_ERROR: Expecting ‘clearance, trace_width, via_dia, via_drill, uvia_dia, uvia_drill, or add_net’ in input/source

‘R:\Design Projects\EVB-020 DROP Project\Hardware\KiCAD\EVB-022\EVB-022_SYS.kicad_pcb’

line 200

offset 6

from C:/Jenkins/workspace/windows-kicad-msys2-stable/src/kicad-4.0/common/dsnlexer.cpp : Expecting() : line 369

Is there some documentation on specifically what changed? Is there a way for me to make the files compatible without lots of effort, or is the only option to do what it says and the person I am sharing with has to use a nightly build in order to open these files?

2

Hi,

Your issue is related to the changes in the file format. A quick fix is to remove the diff_pair_gap and diff_pair_width entities from the net classes.

Tom

4 Likes
3

That did it. I just deleted two lines out of the kicad_pcb file containing those entities and then he was able to open it. Thank you!