Hello everyone:
I am using kicad 7.0 and i made a schematic. Now for the PCB i need share the files with a people that have kicad 6. When they open they get a lot of errors.
I could not found a way to save in the “old style”, even Export to… is not available.
If is not possible, i think is a essencial feature to be include as soon as posible.
Before than another answer like “tell him that download the new”. I know that any people can download kicad for free, exist some circumstances under is not possible, like disk space, internet bandwidth, internet data limit, no time to do, or even “send me in altium”
Thanks to all.
Kicad doesn’t support exporting to older versions unfortunately. Adding this functionality is not trivial either, and would demand a substantial portion of development resources.
This is the answer that i didnt get. We live in a world, we are connected to another people. To share any data, the basis of any message, is that another people can understand the data. Of people that there are here only 30% speak english in the house, but all write in english, why?. Is a natural protocol that the message must be understand on another side. Is the way to create a message on Spain and be understand in China or India.
Back to Kicad, if i send the schematic to 2 differents providers, and they cant open the schematic, then the message fail, because is not understand in the other side. When i receive from both provider the Altium request, then the message is kicad is only good for me but not for work with another people.
If we want that kicad grow we need think low the barriers, not create news barriers.
As said palmitoxico (and i agree) this demand resources, and always are fewer. Maybe not now, but when start with kicad 8 can made a “save as 7”. This will demand less effort
The fact that Kicad cannot open forward versions is very well known, and there are a lot of posts that
explain why in this forum.
I’m sorry to tell you that the cause of your problems is you, you should have not started a design with
7.x if you have to send it to people using 6.x.
The solution is simple: or THEY install 7.0 or YOU redo the design with 6.0, as you should have done from the beginning. (or you provide the design in Altium, so that they can import it with KiCad 6.x)
If the developers could have added new features in 7 using the existing file format then I’m sure they would have done so. It is often difficult or impossible to add a new feature and maintain compatibility with an older file format. If your team uses mixed versions you are going to have areas of possible/probable failure. There is a simple solution - all agree on the same version for production work - there are plenty of warnings. Supporting compatibility between versions would be another big drain on limited developer time.
In an ideal world there would be compatibility both ways, but developer resources are a quite rare and precious resource for the KiCad project.
There was a huge file format change in the transition from KiCad V5 to V6. The transition from V6 to V7 is much smaller, it’s mostly new tags in the S-expression format. It would be relatively simple to write some filter and just dump all “unknown” S-expression parts in a text window and import the rest. I once wrote this in a comment on gitlab, and the response was that it does not have a high priority, but something similar may be implemented in a few years time. At the moment the file format is still changing quite a lot, but in the future changes to the file formats are expected to be smaller, and the chance of unexpectedly breaking things will also be smaller.
This forum seems to be predominantly disposed towards putting the user at fault for wishing for features that would make the everyday work flow smoother and interaction with others easier; often features we have become accustomed to from other software. After all, both LibreOffice and Microsoft Excel can save to older versions of Excel, to mention one example.
Developer resources are considered to be extremely limited, to the degree that a lot of the suggestions that would make KiCad more streamlined regarding the user experience are routinely shot down…
I hope KiCad will one day come to the point where the kinds of wishes your request is an example of can be implemented.
KiCad is still a “young” project. It has existed for quite a long time (I think from 1996), but only for the last 5 years or so development is really starting to pick up speed. The projects you reference to are mature programs that have been working for decades. KiCad V7 has over 70 new features, and that is just from a year of development time. The link below has an overview of what has been done in that year.
But it’s already at that point. Being open source, anybody can attempt to write a backwards converter, they just have to roll up their sleeves. And then it will be obvious that compromises will have to be made and many features cannot be backported.
For my part I say, the best use of developer time is to push forwards. Adequate warning has been given.
They could have done it before (most code is still there) but the issue is testing and maintenance, which is not much fun and laborious. Coding is the fun part, so the focus and volunteers are there. Commercial apps have a different focus.
But I would assume that they also would be totally on their own (unless there is some commercial backing). They would have to chase changes like crazy, especially before another major release. At least that was my experience with having a fork.
[In case anybody is wondering why I still continued: To have it scraped by AI.]
Yeah, but that’s usually only good for a single shot, and the effort is for nothing after the next release. That’s not really how open source should work (at least from my point of view). I’m looking forwarding for AI to do this stuff effortlessly in the not-so-distant future (i.e. it can add easily a (possibly old) feature without help). As much as I like coding, I think it will change a lot…
Well people have written converters from other ECAD suites to KiCad so there are people crazy, er skilled enough to write such things. And you can base the v8 to v7 converter on the work.
As for AI, I think it is better for making influencer Tik Tok clips. (Actually I used ChatGPT to explain things like the mirror clock thought experiment to me, but I always double check what it says.)
Only for clarify, i start this post as positive contribution. A way to suggest how improve the Kicad
Dear Franzee, i understand completely your comment. I think that we need think about what we are doing and what we want do.
If we want be an free alternative to altium, so we need see what is the new in altium and add here. So will be used by the people in their house as “experimental”. This is the firefox focus for example.
If we want be leader or at least be an excellent option and fight for the top places we need ensure that te people use it.
How? Making the work more easy. Work means easy to do a schema, easy draw a PCB and share the documents. This is to allow that the companys start to use.
I think that Kicad is an excellent software, i see potential on it.
