kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Tomasz Wlostowski <tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx>]

On 08/10/2013 11:34 PM, Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
> Tom,
>
> The other thing about your work is that it is important, very important.
>
> The push and shove router is something I could have used today.  Whatever confidence I
> used to have in freerouter is gone.  It is not working for me very well on this current
> board, and I am frustrated to no end with it and the lack of support now.
>
> Hoping for a better solution,
I don't know if mine will be better - AFAIK Alfons has much, much more 
experience writing EDA software, and there is no literature at all on 
interactive PCB routing algorithms. As of now, my P&S can 
shove/walkaround tracks and place vias. Its results are not as clean as 
in the Freerouter (pads sometimes have ugly breakouts which have to be 
fixed by hand, shoved traces sometimes have right/acute-angled corners, 
etc.).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzro0Jc70xI

Before it's really useful I need dragging tracks/vias and loop removal, 
and of course few tons of bugs to fix (memory leaks, occasional 
segfaults and geometry errors). It's also awfully slow on larger boards 
because of no spatial indexing (but at least the GUI itself is not 
sluggish, fortunately wx is not Swing/SWT :D ).

I'll commit the initial version as soon as the bugs are fixed and I have 
written the tool for pcbnew. I don't want to give any specific dates, it 
only depends on the amount of my spare time, current workload and the 
weather on weekends :)

Tom