I can make a board with custom shape pads in a footprint. But, I don’t think they can be scaled unless exploded to free primitives. Custom pad shapes can be made from any primitives (including arcs, segments, regions, fills, etc)
[edit: I’ll just take this to email thread]
Thank you for your efforts by creating the native Altium importer. I have access to Altium Designer, so I can make test files for you.
Ive already made some test files with screenshots to test another Altium to KiCAD converter, are those of any use to you?
Cheers, and greeting from the Netherlands,
Cedric
I have testfiles down to Altium 14 from which are working. The importer itself supports files with the version 6 tag, but I don’t know when Altium introduced them. It would be nice to have testfiles with older versions too.
Thanks for those files. I used them in early development, and they should be fully supported now (except the 3d-stuff I will not include for the moment)
I find some info on FIle versions and tool releases here :
https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-nexus/pcb-dlg-confirmfileformatformfile-format-pcb-ad
eg that says format 4,0 is Protel 99SE
So how do you try this?
I have downloaded the patched nightly (as linked above) but I can’t see how or where to import an altium board?
As this is for something work related and specific findings would need to be shown in altium but I just wanted to give this a go
pointhi, You mentioned you want more Altium test files, complete with screenshots. how can I get those files into your hands?
just PM me in this forum
pointhi just PM me in this forum
Forgive me for my ignorance. Where’s the button for sending you a private message?
Click on a user’s avatar -> Message.
You need to be a basic user. New users do not have the option to send messages. Read a few posts or wait till an admin comes along to be promoted. See https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/
Get to trust level 1 by…
- Entering at least 5 topics
- Reading at least 30 posts
- Spend a total of 10 minutes reading posts
(You are missing reading of one more topic)
ahh, that works but unfortunately an exception was raised - which from a debug point of view is good.
Now I can’t send this file 
so is there any useful information that can be gleaned from this?
Check first on simpler files you may have, to verify your Altium version is broadly ok/compatible.
If you can spare the time, you could try delete of ‘likely suspects’ until the file does load.
Look at example here that have loaded, but complex shapes/pads might be a place to start.
you can just report the exception without the board. If its something like padstack != SIMPLE, thats actually a warning (which I implemented as assert in development, because it was so simple to integrate). Just click continue. The reason is that KiCad does not support complex padstacks yet.
I know, I need to improve warnings to look like in the eagle importer, where a list of possible issues appears at the end.
if it is any consolation, AtoK failed as well .
What Altium version do you use? Can you send me an empty boardfile?
The latest future roadmap
Hi all,
I’ve just compiled a debug build of this branch of KiCAD. In case somebody also wants to do this, here are the commands I’ve issued after installing msys2 64 bit:
Cheers,
Cedric
pacman -Suy
pacman -Su
pacman -S base-devel \
git \
mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake \
mingw-w64-x86_64-doxygen \
mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc \
mingw-w64-x86_64-python2 \
mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config \
mingw-w64-x86_64-swig \
mingw-w64-x86_64-boost \
mingw-w64-x86_64-cairo \
mingw-w64-x86_64-glew \
mingw-w64-x86_64-curl \
mingw-w64-x86_64-wxPython \
mingw-w64-x86_64-wxWidgets \
mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain \
mingw-w64-x86_64-glm \
mingw-w64-x86_64-oce \
mingw-w64-x86_64-ngspice
git clone https://gitlab.com/pointhi/kicad.git
cd kicad
git checkout altium_import
mkdir -p build/debug
cd build/debug
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug \
-G "MSYS Makefiles" \
-DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/mingw64 \
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/mingw64 \
-DDEFAULT_INSTALL_PATH=/mingw64 \
../../
make -j 7 #adjust for your number of cores
make install
After that you can find start the executables from C:\msys64\mingw64\bin
After starting pcbnew.exe in stand alone mode, you can choose file -> import non kicad board file, and point to your Altium file.
Issue the following commands to update KiCAD to the latest version:
cd ~/kicad
git pull
git log
cd build/debug/
make
make install
I’ve looked around in Kicad, the PCB editor and the schematic editor, but I could not find the “Import Altium project” button.
Did I look in the wrong place, or should I open Altium files in another way?