Mitch Bradley wrote: > The "Global Autorouter > Global AutoRoute" menu item calls an external > program named "anneal" (for Linux) or "anneal.exe" (for Windows).
Yup. http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/24/222212 suggests that "MUCS-PCB & KiCAD = FOSS PCB Heaven", with MUCS-PCB over there: http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/apt/projects/tools/mucs-pcb/ They also have an autorouter that uses simulated annealing. I wonder if this may be the missing link. The examples they show suggest that their autorouters can indeed handle rather complex boards, but I wonder if they may not be a bit too via-happy. > But don't expect great results. The KiCad autorouter is, at this point, > somewhat primitive. Yeah, I noticed a few quirks :-) It may actually be interesting to steal some ideas from the algorithm of "pcb". It works without a grid and often produces fairly good results. At least for simple boards, which is all I've tried to far. For more complex board, I would have had to define components and footprints, and that's the area where gEDA rakes in the user hostility awards, with rare gems like all configuration being done through invisible pin attributes, mismatched pin numbering or even numbering schemes between schematic and footprint, and the inability to simply use rectangles to define pads. Kicad illustrates very nicely that one can do without such arcana. The shortcomings of pcb's autorouter are that it sometimes dances around on the same spot (so you get traces with half a dozen tiny segments at some junctions), that the more or less mandatory "optimizations" every once in a while make it violate the design parameters, and, worst of all, that it may break perfectly good connections during "optimization" and stubbornly resist manual repair. - Werner -- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, Buenos Aires, Argentina [EMAIL PROTECTED] / /_http://www.almesberger.net/____________________________________________/ Please read the Kicad FAQ in the group files section before posting your question. Please post your bug reports here. They will be picked up by the creator of Kicad. Please contribute your symbols/modules to the library folder in the group files section. For building Kicad from source and other development questions visit the kicad-devel group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-devel Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-users/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
