We (as a company) are currently considering to switch from Eagle to KiCad. KiCad has a wonderful working Eagle import. What is a little bit unclear to us is the library import. We use a custom Eagle library (about 500 parts) with some additional informations (mainly the ERP number) and adapted footprints matching our manufacturing equipment. Is it possible to import this library before importing all the schematics and boards from Eagle so that the connection to the parts in the library from the schematic/board is not lost?
I don’t need very detailed explanations just some hint which way to go.
Welcome to kicad mod42. I migrated from eagle to kicad about a year and a half ago. I found that if you import an eagle board, kicad does a pretty good job of creating a faithful reproduction and you can generate gerbers that are pretty darned close to the original. But it does not create a library and linkages for you – it creates local symbol/footprint stuff in the kicad project files, iirc. The schematic is not particularly clean – I would not want to do any sort of editing beyond a quick tweak. I consider the eagle import a nice way to get the board into a kicad format for archiving/viewing when you are done with eagle, but not something you want to change to the next revision.
I did however have a good-sized eagle library that I built over many years. I got an account at snapeda so I could upload my eagle symbols and footprints and use their converters to get kicad versions. It was going well until I hit some limit of 50 or so parts, and snapeda said that was all I could do until the next day or something like that. So I created a new account and did 50 more. Then again, and again. After creating a dozen or so accounts, later that day I had all my parts converted. If someone from snapeda is on here: that limit is truly annoying.
From the converted eagle parts I built my kicad symbol and footprint libraries, and worked with them in the v6 workflow (where the symbol links to one or more footprints…) and made quite a few complicated boards with minimal glitches along the way.
This year with v7 I converted my library system to use the new kicad database capability (kinda like eagle’s “device” that ties things together). That was a fair bit of work as well but I really love the library system now – the database has my company unique part number, links to the symbol/footprint/datasheet, fields for description, value, and all the usual suspects, plus ordering info for several vendors. It really works well.
You can use using the kicad-provided libraries to create new boards, but I recommend that you spend some time building your own library, and also plan on creating all of your new boards from scratch, not from eagle board imports. Anyway, that was my conclusion on the eagle imports – other folks likely have different experiences importing boards.