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