Open Altium Schematics

Community
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Hello all!

This is my first time on this Forum, so please forgive me if this is the wrong location for this topic.

I’ve recently finished a project for a friend in Altium Designer 18 and I’m trying to convert the design to a format that is usable and open-able by KiCAD v5. I’ve downloaded the altium2kicad Perl script solution and it is properly converting the PCB files. However, it doesn’t appear to be able to convert the schematic document properly. It exports a .sch file and I try to open it by opening an existing .sch file in a KiCAD project and then I choose ‘File -> Import Non KiCad Schematic’. When I do that I get a very generic error stating ‘Error loading schematic… Unable to read file…’

Has anyone run into this issue? Is there another way for Altium schematics to be exported and converted to a format that KiCAD can utilize?

Thanks in advance for the help!

-Shane

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You might be interested in this: Work in progress: Native Altium Importer.

But it doesn’t help you directly at this point.

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That will definitely be useful in the future, but it looks like it’s only meant for PCB imports.

Does anyone know how to import Altium schematics to KiCAD?

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…“Does anyone know how to import Altium schematics to KiCAD?”…

How big and complicated is this schematic? Maybe it will be easier to draw it in Eeschema? Would you paste it here?

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It’s hard to guess the relative effort of just redrawing it vs converting and very carefully checking and fixing the inevitable glitched and errors. Either you also import the Altium symbol libraries or you are trying to map between them and KiCads own

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Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I’ve been trying to utilize altium2kicad for a few days now and the schematic conversion always fails. I can never open the schematics that it generates. I’ve opened a ticket on their repository so hopefully that can get resolved.

Thanks again for the input.

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Import reads Eagle schematics, so that would be the wrong method.

To open the schematic give it the same name as the project name, then you can open it by clicking eeschema as usual.

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