kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Frank Bennett" <bennett78@...>]

--- In kicad-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Dick Hollenbeck <dick@...> wrote:
>
> Igor and others:
> 
> Ok, the specctra interface is now solid enough for some early adopters 
> to play with. Why would you want to do that? Well because of the 
> outstanding http://freerouting.net router. 

Sweet! Nice job Dick!

I ran my LCD design through and it was routed in a couple of hours.
All my pre-routes were ignored and I had trouble interrupting the
Batch cleanup pass and saving the results...I will give it another
try...one question below...

> 
> This is not only an autorouter, but also an *outstanding*, world class, 
> push and shove manual router.
> later. Here is a start for now: 
> 
> 1) Establish your default via and track sizes and save your board 
> normally in pcbnew. These defaults will be what is used in the 
> freerouter, as defaults only.
> 
> 2) Load the kicad *.brd file into a text editor and edit the lines
which 
> start with "Layer[n]". These are the layer names and types. You can 
> use only two "layer types" with freerouter: signal or power. If you 
> have a power plane on most of a layer, identify that layer as a power 
> layer. Change the layer names if you want, but use no spaces in layer 
> names, underscore is ok. The layer name must be <= 20 characters. 
Save 
> the board file to disk in your text editor.

I did this, but what if I want to declare a whole layer as the
GROUND net, such that the routing is short to a punch through Via.
Is this kind of thing constraintable? Net Class maybe?

I couldn't find this covered in your HowTo or the FreeRoute docs.
Users will surely ask this kind of question.
> 
> Hopefully you will get as much benefit out of this as I have put
effort into making the bridge possible!

thanks for all you do!
Frank
> 
> Happy routing,
> 
> Dick
>