I have a project which I did four or so years ago, in Eagle. I just checked in Eagle 9.6 and it still opens correctly. Two PCBs, mostly SOIC and 0805 on the rear board, through-hole jacks and so on on the front board, plus a cutout to accommodate a large, 10-turn pot.
I have tried to import an Eagle project in the past (I think KiCad 6) and, while the schematic and board imported okay there were a ton of ERC and DRC errors which I didn’t fully understand at the time.
So I guess my two options are:
import the project and expect a lot of fixing up, swappng to KiCad footprints, and so on.
Start again from scratch, re-do the schematic then create and route new boards based on measurements of the original project
Looking for advice on which is likely to be easier in the short term and more maintainable in the long term. I’m using KiCad 8.0.2 on Windows 11.
This is a one-off hobbyist project, not something I plan to make and sell.
If it helps to look at specifics of the design in order to respond, I have it on GitHub, but I am not looking for help with the actual project; just general advice on porting.
Do the import. The importer works pretty good, although it is not perfect. Cleaning up is much less work then doing it from scratch. For cleanup, you can do quite a lot in bulk, such as for example Schematic Editor / Tools / Edit Symbol Library Links to replace all the “eagle resistors” with native KiCad resistors.
A part of the reason you are getting more ERC & DRC violations, is because KiCad is stricter in some area’s, and checks for things that eagle does not. Learn what the violations mean and how to fix them. This will also deepen your knowledge of KiCad so you can use it more effectively.
It’s also possible you get a lot of DRC violations because either clearances or some other design rules are not mapped correctly into KiCad.
But do note I may be a bit overoptimistic. At the moment I’m toying with the import of an eagle project form github/adafruit and it crashes KiCad in various ways. If I know more I will post it in the thread below.
I have imported the schematic and it looks correct. There are 6 ERC, some are missing power flags and some are items that KiCad thinks are unconnected (I have paired pin header and pin sockets, Eagle did not seem to provide a way to indicate they were connected).
For the board though, KiCad can only read Eagle 6 boards. The intersection set of “things Eagle can export” and “things KiCad can import” has one item (Fabmaster); I tried it and the import failed silently.
KiCad can also import from altium. If even that fails, you can do an import from Gerber files. It’s more work, but still a lot better then re-doing the PCB design. More info on:
You also have a third option: Import the project but do not swap to KiCad symbols or footprints. You can just keep using the imported symbols and footprints as-is for imported designs.
