Hello all, I've made a branch of PCB. The intent of the branch is to aid in the debugging and tuning of PCB's autorouter and PCB's trace optimiser.
Motivation Having laid out a couple of boards with PCB 20091103 I became aware of some bugs in the autorouter that made the job difficult: 1 The autorouter was generating traces that the trace optimiser was often refusing to miter. 2 The autorouter would sometimes generate traces that violated DRC by being too close to other copper. 3 The autorouter would sometimes "route on top of itself". The generated traces were valid, but ugly and inefficient. Whilst investigating these bugs I discovered that PCB20081128 didn't seem to have bug 1 or bug 3. I also discovered that the 2008 version often gave better autorouting results for my board (fewer unrouted rats). Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to debug the 20091103 autorouter. Action I have created a branch of git HEAD that has the following features: * Resurrects the autorouter as it was in 2008, allowing it to be run alongside the git HEAD autorouter. * By default the autorouter action now runs git HEAD autorouter followed by the 2008 autorouter and then chooses the best result. * Results of both autorouters are saved alongside the current pcb to allow visual inspection etc. So if your current pcb is "foo.pcb" you'll also see "foo-New.pcb" and "foo-2008.pcb" after autorouting. Installation git clone git://repo.or.cz/geda-pcb/see.git cd see ./autogen.sh ./configure make src/pcb Desired community response * If you're working on a PCB, please give this branch a try and let us know how the two autorouters compare for your board. The easiest way is to post the messages from PCB's message log window about how the two autorouters are performing. Typical messages look like this: AutoRoute() added 878.1" wire & 1304 vias in 715sec. 201 rat lines remaining AutoRoute2008() added 783.1" wire & 1188 vias in 391sec. 112 rat lines remaining Keeping results from AutoRoute2008() * If you're happy to share your PCB then let me know. I'm building up a set of reference PCBs to allow benchmarking. The ones I have so far are located in the new "examples" folder. "examples/downloaded" has original PCBs (as downloaded) "examples/notraces" has the PCBs with existing traces and planes removed to allow autorouter trials. Notes * autorouting now breaks undo -> please save your PCB somewhere safe before experimenting with this branch * A menu checkbox "Settings->Disable 2008 autorouter" is provided to disable the dual autorouter approach. When checked only the normal (git HEAD) autorouter will be used. Best Regards, Stephen Ecob _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user