> I think you may have missed the point of Alfons' post. You can add
> your own clearance classes AFTER you load the design into Freerouter,
> and then on a net by net basis, put them into that clearance class.
I don't think I've misunderstood his post, because I did exactly as he
suggested before I posted originally and it didn't work. The problem
is that the autorouter tries to connect to the pins using the
"kicad-default" track, which uses "default" as the clearance class.
Since "default"-"default" is 12 thou (so the rest of the board has
reliable clearances), it can't do it. What you can do is manually
route a track to one pin on the mlf, change its clearance class to
"mlf", and then (provided "default"-"mlf" is set to 6 thou) route a
track to an adjacent pin and change the new track's class to "mlf" so
you can do the next pin. However, if you then let the autorouter run,
it may well rip up one of those tracks and try to relay it, but it will
relay it using "kicad-default" and snooker itself (and indeed that's
what happened when I tried it). I was not able to find a way to create
a new track class (call it "mlf-track") and assign it to the relevant
nets so that the autorouter would always lay the mlf-connected tracks
using "mlf-track". Even if I could that still wouldn't be the complete
solution, because AFAIK there's nothing to stop the autorouter laying
out two adjacent tracks from the mlf on one side of the board to the
other side of the board at the "mlf" clearance class.
I think what's ideally needed is the ability to highlight an *area* and
tell freerouter that it can route within that area using a different
clearance class ("mlf"). That would give the autorouter freedom to
optimise the angles at which it fans out from the mlf to the rest of the
board (which is at a greater clearance).
Regards,
Robert.
