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I had so many problems with CircuitMaker (Free version of Altium), that I never want to use it anymore.

The problems I had so far:

  • Very cumbersome to deselect trace mode in PCB mode (having to get to find a free area outside the PCB borders)
  • Very hard to select items (e.g. to remove them)
  • Committing changes takes up to minutes
  • Lost several times some work due to CircuitMaker not responding (so committing is needed, but this takes a lot of time)
  • Access violations after having to wait for 30 seconds
  • Not able to place vias (see access violations)
  • Not able to deselect items (see access violations)
  • Even sending the bug report shows: Operations successfully: 503 Service Unavailable? Try again and shows the same file ... so even the bug send report is buggy.

I made quite a big circuit in CircuitMaker (btw, drawing circuits works very well). But now I want to convert it to KiCAD (which I used before and worked much better). Is this possible?

Michel Keijzers
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  • From what you said, someone convinced you to try CircuitMaker once again. How did it go? – MicroservicesOnDDD Jun 17 '22 at 23:43
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    @MicroservicesOnDDD It's a long time ago I gave it a retry, and I don't remember the exact reason (probably it was the unresponsiveness and losing work constantly again). Since then I used KiCad again (although I have to admit I never really assembled a complete project, but so far KiCad works very well for me for designing schematics and the PCB). Now I don't see the need to ever change to CircuitMaker again – Michel Keijzers Jun 19 '22 at 20:59
  • Everything you brought up has a simple hotkey command or it can be configured in the design rules. – sparaps Nov 04 '22 at 16:36

2 Answers2

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Please check out this build thread, about the ongoing development of a Native Altium Importer for KiCAD.

jDAQ
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DSI
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"Altium to KiCad converter for PCB and schematics" (via "Circuitmaker to KiCad design transfer" )

My understanding is that the CircuitMaker file format is the same as the Altium file format.

In my experience, such "translation" never works perfectly when either one or both of the file formats is proprietary, so you'll probably have to carefully check the result and fix at least a couple of things that didn't translate properly.

davidcary
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    Thanks, I will check into it (although someone convinced me to try CM once again) I was afraid that a 'reliable' 1-1 conversion is not always perfect. In case I move to KiCAD, I better can redraw it (since it's mostly the schematics that needs to be redone). – Michel Keijzers Apr 01 '20 at 07:36