We can’t wait to give this a shot!įinally, importing #altium boards into #kicad is only one click away (in the developer version). Head past the break to check out the very boring, but very exciting video of the importer at work, courtesy of himself. As for documents to test against the classic BeagleBone Black sources seen above can be found at on GitHub. If you’d like to try out this nifty new feature for yourself, CNX has a great walkthrough starting at building KiCad from source. And back in January another user left a comment with links to four other (non-KiCad) tools to handle Altium files. His new work is a translation of the Perl plugin altium2kicad by. As himself points out in the patch submission, this is hardly the first time a 3rd party Altium importer has been published.

What do you do as a KiCad user who encounters a design in Altium you’d like to work with? Well as of April 3rd 2020, has merged the beginnings of a native Altium importer into KiCad which looks to be slated for the 6.0 release.

It’s hard to find an exciting photo of a dialog box Altium Designer is a popular non-libre option, but at up to tens of thousands of USD per seat it’s not always a good fit for users and businesses without a serious need.

Around these parts we tend to be exponents of the KiCad lifestyle what better way to design a PCBA than with free and open source tools that run anywhere? But there are still capabilities in commercial EDA packages that haven’t found their way into KiCad yet, so it may not always be the best tool for the job.

Altium kicad importer