[SOLVED] Importing LT's .asc Files to Allegro PCB

[jsherman]

I'm attempting to import LT's provided library of .asc files into an Allegro library using a SKILL script.

Currently, the plan is to automate a process that imports the .asc using the the "pads in" command to convert it into a .brd file. Then I can extract the .dra, .psm, and .pad files from the .brd file using "dump_libraries". The problem I'm having is the *.pad names are all identical from each .brd extraction (pad1.pad, pad2.pad, etc, no matter the .brd file). When I extract to .brd files in a row, all the padstacks get rewritten.

Question 1: does anyone have a recommendation on another method to use?

Question 2: Is there an easy way to rename the pads somewhere in this process? I don't know where the names of the padstacks are determined - it doesn't look like they're specified in the .asc file, but in the .brd file, they seem to already have names when I generate a Padstack Usage Report or a Padstack Definition Report. To me, this indicated that maybe the naming convention might come into play with the options file used to translate from .asc to .brd through the "pads in" command, but again I didn't see anything that looked like it would be used to generate a name.

Thoughts?

 

[jsherman]

I have found a solution to this problem. It's a bit of a pain, but doable.

It seems like the padstacks are named within the .dra file, of which the .brd file contains one instance. So to get anything useful done, you actually need to change the .dra file, not anything in the .brd file. Here's the flow I created in a script:

- Extract .brd from .asc file
- Extract .dra from .brd file
- Loop through each padstack, saving a copy of the padstack with a well defined name
- (still in the loop) replace the poorly named padstacks with the well defined name
- Save .psm file

I hope this helps anyone who has a similar problem in the future!