OpenOrCadParser

Purpose of this project is to provide a C++17 library for parsing Cadence's OrCAD Capture binary file formats. This library can be linked to other software for reading/modifying?/writing? OrCAD binary files.

See also the complementary project OpenAllegroParser.

The focus lies on schematics (*.DSN/*.DBK) and symbol libraries (*.OLB/*.OBK), the second file format is just the extension for its corresponding backup file. Backups should be identical, just with a different file extension.

OrCAD allows exporting its designs to XML files which are easy to read and verify the interpretation of bytes in the DSN/OLB-files. E.g. enums are stored as a numeric value which should be the same that is used in the binary formats. However, it seems like not all information is stored in the XML.

The following two XSD files provide a good overview of the XML file structure, types and much more. They can be used as a reference what features are actually stored in the binary file and which we do already parse and which not.

C:\Cadence\SPB_17.4\tools\capture\tclscripts\capDB\dsn.xsd

C:\Cadence\SPB_17.4\tools\capture\tclscripts\capDB\olb.xsd

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Documentation

1. File Container
   1. Container Structure
2. File Format Changes
3. Tests
4. Parser Implementation

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Current State — January 2023

• I plan on implementing a very basic XML exporter for Package
  • This allows to generate images by importing into KiCad via pyorlib2ki
• It's planned to finish the Package parser around spring 2023
• A PoC KiCad importer should follow in summer 2023

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Build

# Set path to vcpkg
VCPKG_DIR=../vcpkg

# Build
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -S . -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=$VCPKG_DIR/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake
cmake --build build

Dependencies

• Compiler with C++17 Support
• CMake >= 2.8.12
• Boost - Program Options
• compoundfilereader
• fmt
• Magic Enum
• Nameof
• spdlog

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Usage

./cli/OpenOrCadParser-cli --help
Allowed options:
  -h [ --help ]               produce help message
  -t [ --print_tree ]         print container tree
  -e [ --extract ]            extract binary files from CFBF container
  -i [ --input ] arg          input file to parse
  -o [ --output ] arg         output path (required iff extract is set)
  -v [ --verbosity ] arg (=4) verbosity level (0 = off, 6 = highest)
  -s [ --stop ]               stop parsing on low severity errors

./cli/OpenOrCadParser-cli --input file.DSN --extract --output out/
./cli/OpenOrCadParser-cli --input file.DSN --print_tree
./cli/OpenOrCadParser-cli --input file.OLB --verbosity 6 >> file.txt

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Unit Tests

Test Documentation

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Related Projects

orlib2ki (C based OrCAD XML Library to KiCad Converter)

pyorlib2ki (Python based OrCAD XML Library to KiCad Converter)

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How to Contribute?

There are different ways to help this project forward. Some are

• provide test files (manually created or automated via Tcl/Tk),
• help reverse engineering/documenting the file format, or
• implement some unit tests.

In case you don't have access to OrCAD you can get

• OrCAD Viewer free of charge,
• OrCAD Trial with all its functionality for a trial period of 30 days or
• OrCAD Academic Program with all functionality for one semester.

What about OrCAD Lite? It was was replaced with OrCAD Viewer/Trial [1].

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