Hello all. I’ve recently imported an Altium file into KiCAD and both top and bottom solder masks are missing, at least in the 3D view. Below is a photo of what I mean.
I understand that the F.Mask and B.Mask are subtractive, meaning the assume the mask is everywhere, and graphics on this layer actually remove the mask in those areas. But those layers have no graphics in this imported layout, and I’m still seeing no solder mask. How do I “subtract” it in?
I’ve checked the mask Gerber files as well. No mask graphics.
I didn’t know that KiCad have Altium importer.
Please give your exact KiCad version, preferably from Help -> About -> Copy Version Info. Tell also how did you import the file.
Version info
The tool I used
I actually used the online version of the tool, which is linked from the above GitHub page (I can’t add a 2nd link here since I’m a new user).
Had to edit some of the text in the *.kicad_pcb file to get rid of some errors, but the output of the tool did load in KiCAD.
Thank you for looking at this.
Don
Sorry, didn’t read the request thoroughly.
Application: KiCad
Version: (5.1.7)-1, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.5
libcurl/7.71.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1g (Schannel) zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.3.0 libpsl/0.21.0 (+libidn2/2.3.0) libssh2/1.9.0 nghttp2/1.41.0
Platform: Windows 8 (build 9200), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
Build Info:
wxWidgets: 3.0.5 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8)
Boost: 1.73.0
OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
Curl: 7.71.0
Compiler: GCC 10.2.0 with C++ ABI 1014
Build settings:
USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
USE_WX_OVERLAY=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
KICAD_SPICE=ON
It’s a third party tool so I can’t help. Maybe someone else knows about it.
In version 5.99, the unstable development version a.k.a nightly builds, it’s possible to use a native importer integrated into KiCad. You’ll probably would get better results with that. But it comes with all that “unstable development version” entails, although that’s in a pretty good shape now. The files won’t be backward compatible.
Thanks for the reply. I have downloaded a nightly to try the native Altium importer. It fixed the issue with the solder masks but has some other quirks. I will raise those questions in separate topics as needed.
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