I really like KiCad and used it several times for personal projects with the latest version being in many ways superior to CADSTAR. So that left me in a difficult position: basically I was stuck with using CADSTAR forever (nightmare!). The current state of the Altium importer meant we had to spend 2-3 hours of manual effort after the automatic import, which was not acceptable (given we have hundreds of designs).

They fixed some of the errors but left the most time consuming ones with the excuse that the CADSTAR importer is a low priority development for them since not many users request it. To summarise: I spent 18 months back and forth with the Altium representative trying different versions of Altium to find a significant number of import errors that required a lot of manual rework. I spent time looking at Altium, since their literature claims they are able to convert CADSTAR designs, however this proved to not be quite true. The main hurdle with switching design tools is that most of the designs in my company have been done in CADSTAR so the new tool would need to be able to import our existing designs. My motivation for doing so is that in my company we have been looking to change EDA tools (since CADSTAR is really quite dated and clunky to use). Some of you might have already noticed this but for those that haven’t, I thought I’d post in the forum to highlight some work I’ve been doing on the KiCad codebase: a native Zuken CADSTAR importer for KiCad.

Kicad export to altium