kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@...>]

Frank Bennett wrote:
> --- 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

I assume they were left "fixed" as they are coming from from pcbnew. 
Anything not fixed is subject to yanking, deletion and moving.

If your pre-routes were terminated at a via, then you might try 
auto-routing a single net at a time. Just select it and then click 
auto-route. And then ask Alfons in his support forum about the results 
if they confuse you. The auto-router can be steered significantly by 
how you pick your layer costs, and the costs of going against the 
grain. I mean really really significantly steered.

more below.

> 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?

You must add a Kicad zone container to enclose the copper area. And if 
your copper area is to be the entire layer, then make that zone 
container contain the entire layer.

Before loading the dsn file, I would often create a second net class 
using a text editor and put it next to the "kicad_default" net class. 
But you can also do this in freerouter easier. I was using different 
track sizes for the power nets. So I had a net class called "power".

> 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