Regarding Altium:
The sales of Altium claim that they can also read the text format of their own protel tool for DOS, so it would be interessting to get a valid format description to be able to read altium schematics and also to export to altium schematics, so one can use the pcb tool of altium, as it should be better for high speed design according to the claims of the manuf.
Also it is good to help altium users to escape vendor lock in.
Do you know where to find the altium format description? The sales dept claims that users can script in Delphi(!) and dont need the file format, but for longevetiy of designs and using revision control systems a readable and parsable file format is required.
Has anyone experience with the altium formats and some ideas on how to write an importer / exporter altium2kicad?
Ok, I found it:
But still is the tool usable and is there a format description of the altium format?
The https://kicad.org/external-tools/altium2kicad/ tool is a good start but should be rewritten to become part of KiCad, as the Eagle2KiCad import.
Regarding Eagle:
As the new owner of Eagle changed to a subscription “software rental” mode that wants to communicate with the manuf in order to check the license state (and leak some data?), users of eagle get pissed, especially if they want a stable investment like buying a bike and having it instead of renting a bike.
So we can use this momentum of unhappy eagle users to pull them to kicad and make them donate money when they are pleased with it in an production environment.
But the prerequisite is rock solid operation and stable import of eagle designs. Best would be a batch import of all eagle designs in a directory, while having a name space for the endings, as mentioned before, like kicad_ in order to avoid chaos when doing a batch import.
When we manage to satisfy former eagle users the kicad project will gain much momentum.
I for example test KiCad with small stuff in order to prepare the gradual migration a small HW R&D dept. to KiCad once it is really stable and at least as good as Eagle 6.X. Stability is a must.
No more issues with licensing and student projects. Just dowload the tool, develop, contribute here and there and having a great time developing with a free-as-in-freedom EDA tool.
This would be very pleasing to know that any contribution gets into freedom and light and not into the dark vendor-locked-in world of mordor.
Maybe, you can make them publishing it with the same argument M$ was forced to standardize and document their complicated XML file format.
Libreoffice / Openoffice has a good well documented format which made it first through the standard bodies.
So if you play config management the hard way you want to be able to generate the artefacts from source files even when the tool vendor does not supply the tool anymore. With well documented data formats, one at least in theory is able to throw money at the problem and to hire people to code a converter tool to be able to import old designs.
If a party really insists on file documentation or otherwhise would not buy 42 seats of the tool, I guess the vendor would move.
… and realize, that I can count on my fingers up to 32 on just one hand. So, is the guy in the image actually trying to inform the viewer that the correct number is “4”?
I think you confused “most significant bit (MSB) first”/“least significant bit (LSB) first” with big endian/little endian.
The former defines the bitorder in a stream of bits. The later defines the byte order in a stream of bytes. (big endian can have both MSB or LSB first ordering so does little endian.)
@Sprig, @Rene_Poschl, @SembazuruCDE ;
When I laughed at these last 6 posts, my wife wandered over to see what was so funny. She barely comprehended the humor even after I explained it. (She DOES recall the word “palindrome” from when we played around with them a couple decades ago.) It mostly reinforced her belief that “Engineers make rather decent husbands, but you don’t want to be caught dead with one at a party.”.
Dragging this thread back to subject, several of us have bugs fixed and closed in the 5.1 branch, so it would be good to have a snapshot available to test before official 5.1.1 release.
For those interested I created a 5.1 nightly build pkg script for winbuilder (actually, I modified an existing one), that uses the 5.1 branch, but uses the symbols, footprints etc from 5.1.0.
@jsreynaud
Could a nightly V5.x.x be possible for Ubuntu?
I love helping with testing, but since I use kicad mainly for work I prefer to be able to fallback to stable
Juet to understand. You want to be able to run in same time 5.1.1 (stable) and 5.1 dev branch in the same time ?
Currently it’s possible to run 5.1.1 (stable) and master (main dev branch) in the same time…
(Or maybe I do…) 
perhaps even V5 stable, V5 dev and nightly