KiCad import of an Eagle project

Now that I've gotten the FPGA-based emulation of the i4004 CPU running, I thought I'd go back to the discrete component implementation. It would be nice to get that running for the 50th anniversary of the chip, and that's only 11 months away.

That project, though, was started using Eagle as a PCB CAD tool. I haven't used Eagle in about four years, having spent all my hobbyist efforts on KiCad. I could finish them using my perpetually-licensed Eagle 7 installation, but do I really want to? I'd have to relearn the UI, after spending so long with the KiCad UI.

I've long wondered whether it would be worth the effort to move the remaining four PCBs from Eagle to KiCad. Each of these PCBs have complete schematics occupying several Eagle schematic pages. I'd completed basic layouts, and started routing to some extent. I knew KiCad v5 had an Eagle import capability, but how would it handle this situation?

Frankly, I didn't hold out much hope for this working well enough to be practical.

With KiCad v6 on the horizon it seemed smarter to try that rather than play with v5. After updating my KiCad sources with the latest code I rebuilt and installed v6. Then I created a new KiCad project and started experimenting with the Eagle import feature.

It took a few tries to figure out how this is supposed to work. However, quite to my surprise, the results look very good. The schematics imported cleanly, including the custom symbols I'd created for the FDV-301 and BSS-83 MOSFETs. The inter-sheet connections were all properly translated to global labels (Eagle 7 has no concept of hierarchical sheets). The layouts and initial routing I'd done also came across nicely.

This might actually work!