Mailing list archives : pcb-rnd

ID:5124
From:rn...@igor2.repo.hu
Date:Mon, 13 Sep 2021 17:47:03 +0200 (CEST)
Subject:[pcb-rnd] new: protel support
Hi all,
 
another feature that I've been working in the background is io_altium. As 
of r35674, it is buildin by default and it is fully capable of loading 
Protel Advanced PCB ASCII boards. These boards usually have 'ascii' in 
their filename, often ending in .pcb or .PcbDoc.
 
Zooming out a bit: protel used to make autotrax and easytrax  in the 80's. 
We support that format via io_autotrax. Then they sold Protel Advanced 
PCB, or in short, Protel, in the 90s. This is what io_altium supports now. 
In the 2000s they switched to Altium, which has yet another file format. 
 
So if you have protel files from the 90s in the ascii format, you can now 
use pcb-rnd to load them. (Protel advanced pcb also had a binary format 
that we do not support.) 
 
The code is in beta testing phase now: it generally works, it loads random 
samples I got from the Interwebz, but there may always be one more trick 
in the format I haven't seen yet. So if you have a board it doesn't load 
properly, please make a bugreport.
 
Thanks to those who contributed in the testing so far!
 
(You may wonder why the plugin is called io_altium if it loads protel... 
Well, it is very very close to being able to load altium binary boards 
too! In fact it already loads them mostly, but I still have a few critical 
bugs I need to handle. I will make a separate announcement when loading 
altium boards becomes a safe option. So at the end we'll have support for 
the file formats of all the different decades/products of this line.)
 
Best regards,
 
Igor2
 
 

Reply subtree:
5124 [pcb-rnd] new: protel support from rn...@igor2.repo.hu