I have sucessfully imported a board design from Eagle into Kicad. The manufactured board even works, so well done Kicad. The board was 100mm x 100mm so outside of the 100mm x 80mm limit of my paid for version of Eagle.
On the import process I noted that the Eagle tName and tplale layer seem to be added together and end up on the Kicad Fsilk layer.
Is there a way of stopping Kicad importing the tplace layer from Eagle ?
tPlace (and bPlace) is intended to be used for silk. This is why kicad moves it to the silk layer.
See the autodesk documentation: https://www.autodesk.com/products/eagle/blog/every-layer-explained-autodesk-eagle/
The second layer moved to silk is the names layer as it contains the reference designators which are by default on silk for kicad (and also eagle)
I appreciate that it moves it on purpose, but as it says in that document;
‘You need to be careful when using this layer not to place silkscreen on any soldered areas. Otherwise, you could risk creating a short on your board or creating a unsolderable pad’
I must say that some parts libraries in Eagle are not so careful and the tPlace layer does get in the way sometimes. Yes I realise I can edit the parts (in Eagle) to move the tPlace stuff to a custom layer, but wondered if somewhere within the Kicad conversion scripts the use of the tPlace layer could be stopped.
Thanks for the reply.
KiCad has the option to subtract the mask layer from silk on gerber export. So it is a bit less of a concern.
You can also edit the imported footprint and strategically remove silk where you don’t need it. (place the footprint into a new lib before changing it. Allows you to reuse the fixed footrprints. Or possibly replace it with one from the kicad standard lib if you want to save on labor. But that could then result in DRC violations.)
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