Thanks folks! You’re the best.
I will heed the advice to recreate this project and will take it as an exercise to redraw and re-layout based on the images on the page. A good way to learn Kicad 5 I guess.
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I can not speak for @John_Pateman but i played around with the board in question. It is simply created with a kicad version too old for being compatible with version 4. (KiCad nightly did not open the board at all. But i did not get an error message.)
I could open it in v4 but after saving it needed to use a text editor to do some manual fixes. (Some layers where discovered wrong so there where a few things that had “Bad Index!” set as their layer.)
My guess would be that some of the support for files by these old versions was simply removed from version 4 and possibly even more was removed from version 5.
I compiled with the fix for the above mentioned bug. I could open the project and the pcb file. It just gave a message dialog about saving in the newer file format. And indeed after a small modification I saved it and this is the new file:
(kicad_pcb (version 20171130) (host pcbnew “(5.1.0-rc1-18-g1c8077148)”)
But zones are indeed lost.
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I have just opened a 2005 kicad project with version 5.0.2 to see if it works.
- Schematic needs to be remapped
- Layout works fine as far as the legacy F9 canvas is used
Yes, that looks like it is the issue. That was a quick fix! Good know that we might be able to rescue old designs - I still reckon it is a good exercise to re-do this in K5 though, even just as a learning exercise. Shows the value of having good documentation. 
As a side note, the topic of opening old projects (for various definitions of “old”) keeps popping up. It is an important aspect of software maturity, but it seems like it gets low priority with the development team. I am not sure if people are aware that especially in commercial usage it is important to be able to open files created a year ago. Often the person opening the file will not be the original author and will not be able to answer confusing questions about using components from cache or library versions.
I have been bitten by this, so now I have a solution: I keep a VMware virtual machine with a full installation of Ubuntu and KiCad, for every significant project. Storage is cheap these days, and this guarantees that you will be able to access your projects in the future. This solution has already saved me tons of time and frustration.
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What is needed is a small archive of old projects of the various releases too test.
I see JP-Charras has just committed a patch for this project, he is probably the only long term KiCad developer left.
(Slightly Off Topic) I find this thread a little unsettling. The initial post presents a project, whose design is essentially lost because it is a whopping SEVEN years old! In my mind this raises questions falling somewhere in the realms of ethics, integrity, corporate responsibility . . . . I gotta think about how to classify it for a bit.
Seven years? 80% of the coins in my pocket are older than that! I’m obliged to keep legible and readable copies of tax returns for 7 years. My two computers are 9 years old and 7 years old. My car is 10 years old. I’m wearing 5 year old shoes. My wife is . . . . ummmm . . . . well . . . . we’re together for life so it doesn’t matter, but our 7th anniversary was early in Mr Reagan’s administration.
Should I simply shake my head and accept the fact that engineering information becomes inaccessible after 7 years? I hope not - there are strategic bombers flying with airframes older than the PARENTS of the crewmen flying them!
Dale
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KiCad simply was not ready back then. It had many missing features. (Including lots of stuff that would make it possible to reuse the project.)
See the early versions as beta releases and everything makes sense.
Oh and i have to disagree with the project is lost. I could open it normally in version 4. As expected the missing cache library made sure the schematic is basically a lost cause (This is the fault of the original designer. One can not expect the software to work if you do not include all the data required.)
The only thing that is a bit lost are copper zones. But they are rebuild easily. (This is because copper zones where bodged in the first release. If you look at the file you will discover that kicad simply put a ton of traces to fill the area of the zone. There is not really any info about the zone itself only the traces.)
As a note: one can view the project in v4 without fully loosing the zones. (But the zone looks strange. -> missing the outermost outline, only the traces for filling are shown.)
Oh and regarding your bomber: Well yes the documentation for it still exists. So you can maintain that thing and if needed even build new parts for it. (For the later you might still need to draw that part new in a modern cad program if you want to use modern manufacturing technologies like CNC.)
If you would want to make a medium modification to it you would basically need to start from scratch as the design files are not available in a digital form.
Same here. Making the same unmodified thing is easy as the gerbers are still valid. Modifying it is possible if the original project was created and archived correctly. (including the cache library would be the minimum requirement.)
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Did V1 have a symbol cache file?
Anyway, this shows the sanity of using plain text files, I have several 7 yearish projects in my office that are hopelessly locked away by binary file formats, encryption and expired software licensing
If not then the user should have included a self made one. At least if they wanted to have the project useable anytime in the future. (Yes early versions of kicad required much deeper knowlede of the software. It is kind of amazing how far KiCad has come. And even more amazing that people seem to have been prepared to use it in its early days with so many key features seemingly missing.)
Yes, the cache.lib file is there since the very beginning.
Not fully lost. The list of libraries is saved into the schematic file. Although the libraries are old, they can be found in the old repositories.
Exactly
Edit: old repositories @notthetup
http://downloads.kicad.org/archive/old_versions/original_index.html
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It would be good if someone with spare time put these fragments of history together into a few pages of “official history” to go into the KiCad website. I have seen a code size graph, but little else
This comment raises an issue that occasionally appears on this Forum: archives and portability. I’d like to have a simple, one-click menu item that produces a compressed file of reasonable size, containing all the essential information from a KiCAD project. Something I could pass on to any other person, knowing there is a high probability he can open the project with his KiCAD installation. At the very least, it should be opened by any version of KiCAD with the same major release number. Better yet, the current major release plus the immediately previous major release. And . . . . expected future major releases.
I know, that last requirement is somewhat demanding, since it forces the developers to predict the future. But let’s make a good-faith guess at what information a future release will need to open a project. If the old project requires file-format conversions, library remapping, etc, that’s OK - as long as the future release can perform the task using only the information within the archive, and without resorting to clunky scripts, add-ons, extensions, supplementary tools, etc.
Dale
This already exists. And you can even zip the project your self. As long as you include the cache lib everything except 3d model stuff will work years down the line.
The rescue dialog will take care of symbol libs that have changed between the installation of the reader and the one by the original designer.
If you want 3d model stuff to be included then you need to use scripts right now. You might also choose to use scripts to extract symbols from their libraries and place them in a local lib if you do not trust the rescue stuff or want to hide it from future readers. (After all it might seem strange to a future reader that they are presented with the rescue stuff when reading the project.)
I think such a script is flying around somewhere on the forum.
I still hope the cache library stuff will go away with version 6 and the symbols will finally be included in the schematic file similarly how footprints are included in the pcb file. But until then the cache library is simply one of the most important files of your project. (The same holds true for the rescue library should it exist.)
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Here it is. It can also copy all the symbols from cache library to project local ‘archive’ library, so that the person opening the project does not see the rescue dialog. If I have the time I might add the option to create a .zip file though if somebody beats me to it, I’ll gladly accept a PR.
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Do you mean this button?
It seems to zip most project files including the cache library.
I added some dummy text files, they get also zipped.
These files (and others) without an extension do not get zipped:
fp-lib-table
sym-lib-table
.bak files are also excluded from the archive (as expected).
Then I added a subdirectory with 2 pdf files as documentation and these also get zipped.
Other files in the “doc” subdirectory do not get zipped.
Files with the extension “txt” in the doc subdir do get zipped, but with extension “.doc” not.
To me it seems a bit too arbitrary to rely on for backups and archiving.
Some day I will have my own server in the air (on the wire?) to host my public git repositories…
[quote=“Rene_Poschl, post:25, topic:15122”]
I still hope the cache library stuff will go away with version 6
[/quote] Same here. The Cache lib is an intrinsic part of the schematic and I do not see a valid reason to keep it as a separate file.
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Hi Dale-
I won’t pile on here but I’ll just note that the file was posted here two days ago and JP fixed the issue within 12 hours. It probably would have been fixed sooner if the project were posted to the bug tracker. We take longevity seriously and fix (with high priority) any issues like this that are identified.
In the case of this specific board, it appears that it was hand-modified, so it only opened correctly where the hand modification worked. The fix prevents a crash with this sort of malformation but can’t keep the old segment fills.
-S
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