[Cryptech Tech] Convert Alpha schematics to KiCad

[Fredrik Thulin]

Hi all

The electronic schematics for the Alpha board were made in Eagle CAD.

Layout (the process of designing a printed circuit board from schematics) of a 
board like the Alpha is a significant effort and was donated to the project by 
the company Infotecs, and thus they got to choose the tool used to do the 
layout.

They chose Altium Designer which is one of the most commonly used tools used 
by professional board designers. Altium Designer can import Eagle schematics, 
but can't export to Eagle format so what we got from them was an Altium 
project and manufacturing files.

Since we wish for our designs to be freely reusable by as many people, 
projects and companies as possible, we would like to convert the board design 
to a free electronics design program with an open file format. Subjective, but 
I would say KiCad appears to be the best option available today.

I started looking for a way to convert the Altium project to a KiCad project, 
and most ways led me to a Github repository [1]. I tried it, and it didn't 
work very well. The author, Philipp Gühring, solicited files that didn't work 
well, so I contacted him. It turned out he was already subscribed to this list 
(!!) and he has been *very* helpful with improving the conversion tool to work 
with the Cryptech files.

At this point, the project is reasonably well converted, although there might 
be an issue with connectivity of traces to pads in inner copper layers. I'm 
also still too ignorant about KiCad to tell if the, uhm, "components" are 
converted well enough or if some kind of mapping between the schematic part 
and the footprints on the PCB side is still missing/incomplete/corrupt.

We would like to solicit help/review/cheers from other people interested in 
this that might have more KiCad knowledge, or willing to learn =). I've put 
the output of using the conversion scripts in the Github repo [1] on the 
Altium Designer project files [2] into a user/ft repository at [3]. Please 
note that I might overwrite the repo at [3] after future runs of the 
conversion tool.

/Fredrik


[1] https://github.com/thesourcerer8/altium2kicad
[2] https://wiki.cryptech.is/browser/hardware/cad/rev03
[3] https://wiki.cryptech.is/browser/user/ft/alpha_to_kicad