Hello KiCad developers, I'm an electronics engineer and PCB designer who has been working a lot in OrCAD and allegro, but have been transitioning more and more to KiCad. Since i have many hundreds of designs already done in OrCad, and especially often get reference designs in OrCad format, i have been working on a Windows app that converts them to KiCad.
Thus, i was thinking this would be a nice contribution to make this app into an import option for KiCad so i used Claude with the latest Fable 5 to turn my app into an import option in KiCad. Before i submitted the code for this, i ran the app on some 800+ .dsn files i had accumulated on my computer over the years, and i have fixed all issues i could notice. How it was validated -------------------- I checked correctness by exporting the imported netlist with kicad-cli and comparing named-net pin membership against OrCAD's own stored net tables. I ran this across a corpus of 815 real-world designs (OrCAD releases spanning ~1995–2026): all import without crashing, and on modern flat/multi-page designs the net membership matches. Hierarchical designs currently import flattened (with warnings); pre-2003 files are rejected with a clear message. Every page also loads and plots in the current master build. Prior art / relationship to existing work ------------------------------------------ Format knowledge derives from the MIT-licensed OpenOrCadParser project plus my own reverse engineering. I'm aware of the draft MR !1963 by Werni2A adding an OrCAD Library (.OLB) importer — this schematic (.DSN) importer is complementary to that effort, and both build on OpenOrCadParser. Disclosure: AI assistance ------------------------- In line with KiCad's tool-generated-content policy, I want to be transparent up front. The OrCAD .DSN format reverse-engineering, the validation corpus and methodology, and all the scope and design decisions are mine. The code itself — both the original standalone converter and this C++ port into KiCad — was written with an AI coding assistant (Anthropic's Claude Code) under my direction, and I iterated on it against the ~815-design corpus until it was correct. I've reviewed and validated the result and I take full responsibility for the code and its maintenance. The branch is on my fork here for reference: https://gitlab.com/TaipeiViking/kicad/-/tree/orcad-schematic-importer Thanks for taking a look — I'd welcome any guidance before I raise the MR. Next, i am working on AI driven auto place and route that i would like to also contribute in the future. Best, Clas Sivertsen, Taipei Taiwan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "KiCad Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/kicad.org/d/msgid/devlist/4e1974b0-3542-41f5-a0dd-a68eac0ea96bn%40kicad.org.
