Re: Cheap Cad program which can import Protel files

"John" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
> Does anyone know of a free or cheap (<$1000) cad program capable of
> doing imports of protel99SE schematics and PCBs?
> A few months ago I tried some that made this claim but could not get
> them to work. It would not need to be a perfect importing process,
> some manual work is OK but I would like to spend less time on it that
> manually re-drawing the drawings I have.

If you are willing to use the Protel 99 package to export,
you could save to file in Autotrax format and edit it with
that package.  Be careful, there are a number of "gotchas"
between Protel versions - best to stay away from conversions
if the boards are multilayer rather than just double sided.

Altium/Protel graciously provide Autotrax for free on their
website.  Unfortunately, the schematic editor which matched
Autotrax is not available on their website.

You can get a number of drivers, utilities and fixes to try
and wrest Autotrax into the 21st century (eg The previous
video resolution was 640 x 480 - we've made larger now) from:
http://www.airborn.com.au/layout/easytrax.html

I wouldn't normally suggest this to someone who has not used
Autotrax before... but it is free, and all the stuff that
we have done to improve it is open source, with links to it
all at the URL above.  There is even a tutorial and list of
known bugs.

-Steve, www.airborn.com.au