Development Highlight: CADSTAR PCB Importer

Roberto Fernandez Bautista had a growing desire at his workplace to migrate away from CADSTAR. After trying and finding migration paths to other EDA tools inadequate and poorly supported, he has leveraged the open source nature of KiCad to create just what he needs and contribute to the greater community :D

Thanks to his hard work in MR#279,KiCad is now able to import CADSTAR PCB files! With the schematic importer coming soon.

The board import option can be found under the File > Import > Non-Kicad Board File option and changing the file type filter

After which in the import file dialog you must change the file filter

After selecting your CPA file and a short delay. Pcbnew will display its best attempt at a import and provide warnings if it had any difficulties importing the file.

Clicking on Details (recommended) will show you any conversion related changes that were made.

In this example, this Github hosted project was imported to get the resulting kicad pcb

If you want to give the board import a spin, simply download the latest KiCad nightly. Feel free to report any issues you may find.

If you want to join in on a discussion on this feature, you may find a forum thread with the developer here