kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Simon Turner <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all

Sadly having to report more problems (following on from the KiCAD 
autorouter fiasco). I thought I'd try the auto module placement tool - 
What a waste of time.

Now I drew my outline, I placed and locked critical parts and then set 
to autoplace. Where did my first footprint get put ? straight on top of 
another one !

I had previously tried drawing a 3" square box around the "pile" that 
resulted from the netlist import and all it did was start to create 
another "pile" of parts in the top left corner of my outline. It's like 
the PCB footprints are being ignored and the algorithm is just looking 
at getting the pads as close together as possible.

I also noted that the so called placement process is pathetically slow 
and used only 5% of one of my 4/8 processors, for this size of board it 
is literally faster to place the parts myself (even if the auto place 
worked) - This can't be a dissimilar process from autorouting and the 
java router would route this board in seconds yet part placement could 
take hours.

I know you guys put a lot of effort and I note that significant progress 
has been made lately but surely these sorts of things can be tested 
first ? It just makes the project look silly.

I'd also like to suggest that a bit more interaction goes on with the 
rest of the world and that new releases of the code are more 
forthcoming. for example if i try to install KiCAD from the software 
centre of Ubuntu (which is undoubtedly one of the most popular versions 
of linux for some unknown reason and if I understand correctly the same 
code source is used for similar variants of linux) I get a version that 
I'd say is about a year out of date as functions that I'm used to 
finding are not even there. Yes I tried a manual install and was pleased 
to find that it was more up to date than my windows version but that was 
very tedious and updating failed while the packages I was apparently 
missing from ubuntu could not be found in the software centre or 
installed for some reason. Some of us are merely budding electronics 
engineers, not linux and software experts and if the most accessible 
version is 1 year out of date then I'm afraid it makes the whole thing 
look laughable. As if it's not enough that I have to worry about my 
design working and that I've got the right footprint with correct pin 
associations (because some of the libraries are well dodgy) and that 
routing has all gone to plan I have to cross check that the software is 
behaving properly (like the other day I tried the auto router and had 
tracks ploughing through each other - good job I checked or I'd look 
like a right idiot), that will not have people coming back for more.

Kind regards and with thanks for all your hard work so far.

Simon