Electronics > PCB/EDA/CAD

Converting Mentor PADS to PADS ASCII

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joule:
Hello friends

I found this really cool TI reference design, but it's *ancient*

https://www.ti.com/tool/TIDM-BIDIR-400-12

I have PADS .pcb and .sch files for the design, but they are BIN and not ASCII so I can't open them in a modern program.

Does anyone have a version of PADS installed that could export these as ASCII files?

-j0ule

Doctorandus_P:
I had a quick look at the .pdf of the PCB and it looks fairly simple.
KiCad can create a PCB project from a set of gerber files, and although the conversion is not perfect (a lot of info is missing in gerber files), it's still a lot better then a full manual re-creation.

There is a quite nice tutorial for doing this on the KiCad forum:
https://forum.kicad.info/t/reverse-engineering-kicad-project-from-gerber-files/30903

I assume other EDA programs can do something similar and something in that direction seems your best option if you can't manage to do a direct conversion.

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