Hello there!
I want to order some Shruthi PCB’s, but I can’t open the .brd files from github, because I’m using Kicad instead of Eagle. Anyone solved this problem before? Kicad shows the possibility to open Eagle 6.x .brd files, but this doesn’t seem to work. What version of Eagle are the boards made with? Or do I have to buy Eagle … ?
Regards!
Marcel
You don’t have to buy Eagle - or at least I managed to download it directly from their website and make conversion. Take a look at this post by Kvitekp in Shruthi XT pcb’s group buy topic
Are you sure you have saved .brd files instead of webpages showing the list of revisions to the .brd files?
Yes indeed! There’s a freeware version of Eagle, you can simply download and install it! Keeping your eyes open proves to be helpful from time to time 
Tested it, and it works! I can also make Gerber files in there, and if I save it, they are saved as a newer version of Eagle .brd, which can also be read by Kicad! (So the problem for Kicad was that the .brd’s were in older version than 6.x)
Thanks a lot!
@MarcelB: Can you briefly explain how to open Eagle .brd files in KiCad? I cannot seem to find any information about that in the manual. Thanks!
Hi Ilmenator!
Not sure it’s in the manual, it’s a rather brief one.
Open Pcbnew (the board editor of Kicad), and just select “Open” in the “File” menu. You can now choose a file type to open kicad pcb’s, or Eagle 6.x .brd files (and I also have P-cad .pcb files, whatever that is).
I only didn’t get the beautiful silkscreen graphics into Kicad yet. I’m working on it
Maybe you need a newer version of Kicad? I’m using a stable build of July 2013 under Linux, but windows version should be the same.
Ok, it seems like the trick was to run Pcbnew standalone, i.e. not launching it through Kicad. It is then possible to open board files. Thanks!
I want to make the switch to KiCAD so I can design bigger PCB’s. As my very first step I tried to open Volts.brb from pcbnew.app. I got this error:
PS I do not have a user “jenkins” on this machine and I do not use the Jenkins build service.
Error loading board.
IO_ERROR: Unknown file type
from /Users/jenkins/remoteroot/workspace/KiCadBuildMac4/kicad/pcbnew/legacy_plugin.cpp : checkVersion() : line 570
jenkins is probably the guy who built the KiCad binary.
I use an old version of Eagle, so it’s very probably that KiCad cannot open the files. Eagle changed to an easy to read XML-based file format, but I’m not using this “new” Eagle version.