as the corporate perception of Easy-PC is still that it's a bottom end productĪgreed, -the name "Easy_PC" doesn't exactly conjure up the image of the high quality product which it is. This is purely a personal opinion from looking at the facts available to any user, so there's always the possibility that I've read it completely wrong! Speculatively, it would be a reasonable move for RS to make to protect any investment they may have made in Design Spark. I don't have any privileged or inside knowledge regarding this, so this is purely a personal opinion, but my presumption would be that there may be some contractual provision blocking the addition of Design Spark import to Easy-PC. I think it's now an open secret that Design Spark and Easy-PC have the same roots. The alternative would be an agreement with the vendor to allow the import to happen, but not surprisingly, many vendors, especially high end ones, are extremely reluctant to pursue this path, especially as the corporate perception of Easy-PC is still that it's a bottom end product (which in many ways is simply not the case). Even if this format were to be broken, there's nothing to prevent the vendor changing the encryption with the next version, so maintenance of the import would become a nightmare. One of the obstacles to supporting other vendor's formats is that many of them are encrypted. To start adding imports for each PCBCAD vendor would take forever and cost a fortune, and that's if other companies were willing to give me their formats.
Protel 99se export to p cad software#
I wrote my own PCBCAD software and sell it for about £5 a go on ebay.īelieve it or not I get people asking if it can import other companies CAD files. Import from Design Spark would save re-entering customer's draft designs.
and I've had lots of them so I should know! I doubt that you could purchase Altium for only £1.60 per week! I suspect adding those feature would put it beyond the reach of many users.īirthdays are good for you: the more you have, the longer you live. Whilst adding all these import formats may be a nice idea, I think EasyPC is the best tool in its class.
Protel 99se export to p cad upgrade#
This could open a market for updating old designs for those that cannot afford the original software to upgrade their designs (ie old Protel designs need Altium to upgrade so a Protel import would open this for you, or Allegro is needed for OrCAD, etc.). Especially those that are not in use any more. Slowly building on the imports for older designs to allow these older designs to be imported to EASYPC for legacy work. Eagle can be imported already (I tried it and it works very well) so maybe Altium Schematic and PCB files could be added to start. I know that supporting such a wide range would be a huge investment, especially with the UK economy looking very bleak (with Brexit and the weakening pound), but could I suggest maybe one or two of these imports to start. This is a product more in line with the capabilities of software such as PADS and Altium, and does have a long list of import formats including many which you include in your original post. Having said that, I would suggest that you have a look at Easy-PC's "sister" product called Pulsonix. This has knock-on implications in terms of things like spacing and thermal rules to be applied when generating manufacturing outputs. Apart from the business implications of the level of investment that would be required, there is also the issue that many of those formats that you list have data capabilities beyond the ability of Easy-PC to hold in it's design data format.
I am sure you can imagine that supporting such a wide range of import formats comes at quite a cost in terms of development and maintenance of the code. The customer would have to accept that my updated designs would be in EasyPC format only or ODB++ and Gerber output. I could import and edit in EasyPC and supply the gerbers for almost any design given to me. I get requests for updating various designs and if it was possible to import many designs into EasyPC. It is possible for EasyPC to have similar import capabilities (export need not be an option). PADS Logic ASCII Part Type Libraries (*.p) PADS Logic ASCII CAE Decal Libraries (*.c) P-CAD V16 or V17 ASCII Library files (*.lia) P-CAD V16 or V17 Binary Library files (*.lib)
P-CAD V15, V16, or V17 ASCII PCB design files (*.pcb) P-CAD V15, V16, or V17 Binary PCB design files (*.pcb) P-CAD V16 or V17 ASCII Schematic design files (*.sch) P-CAD V16 or V17 Binary Schematic design files (*.sch) The method of import may differ between different file types, and are detailed in the sections thereafter.Īll previous Protel/Altium Schematic files/librariesĪll previous Protel/Altium PCB files/libraries The following provides an overview of what file types can be imported into Altium Designer. I have seen that Altium can import from many different designs.