Posted in Software Development Tagged altium, binary file, eda, file, file format, json, reverse engineering Post navigation With a little bit of code, managed to dump all these text records into a pseudo plain text format, then convert everything into JSON.

Looking through the lens of this file format, found all the content was held in a stream called ‘FileHeader’, everything was an array of strings (yeah, everything is in text), and lines of text are separated by ‘|’ in name=value pairs. It turns out, Altium uses something called a Compound Document File, similar to what Office uses for Word and PowerPoint files, to store all the information. Yeah, this is as raw as it can possibly get, but simply by scrolling through the file, he was able to find some interesting bits hanging around the file. ’s first step towards using an Altium file with his own tools was opening it up with a hex editor. Altium is one of the worst offenders, but by diving into the binary files it’s possible to reverse engineer these proprietary file formats into something nearly human-readable.

Not all EDA softwares are created equally, and a lot of vendors use binary file formats as a way to keep their market share. Now anyone can write their own design tools for Eagle without mucking about with binary files. Several times in the last few weeks, I’ve heard people say, ‘this will be the last PCB I design in Eagle.’ That’s bad news for CadSoft, but if there’s one thing Eagle has done right, its their switch to an XML file format.

Altium annotate schematics