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Date:	Tue, 6 Oct 2015 15:05:07 -0400
Message-ID:	<CAM2RGhTFK_yMH2F9tsX0cSQZmLZU6M2GfLZ-5BKNQB1-LXZTMA@mail.gmail.com>
Subject:	Re: [geda-user] GTK3, Glade interface designer (router, auto?)
From:	"Evan Foss (evanfoss AT gmail DOT com) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com]" <geda-user AT delorie DOT com>
To:	gEDA users mailing list <geda-user AT delorie DOT com>
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On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 2:45 PM, Stefan Salewski <mail AT ssalewski DOT de> wrote:
> On Tue, 2015-10-06 at 02:34 +0200, Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:
>> Stefan Salewski wrote:
>>
>> > The real hard part is, that people really do not like autorouters
>> > generally,
>>
>> I don't like auto routers which fail on my boards ;-)
>> My biggest concern with what the toporouter could demonstrably do is
>> that
>> it is/was a game of all or nothing. You could not tell the router to
>> restrict itself to some routes picked by me. And more troublesome, it
>> was
>> not able to play nice with tracks and vias already put in place by me.
>> Both are hard deal breakers for me.
>
> Of course the router should not fail, and you should be able to manually
> continue. But the toporouter idea is generally starting with a board
> with no traces, and doing a complete route. You can tell it to use only
> a subset of nets, but that is generally not helpful.
>
> Read the thesis, maybe you have ideas how to improve that.
>
> You may think about the connections to ground and power planes, that
> point is not really covered in the thesis. The thesis is more concerned
> with chip design. Should be not hard, but we have to do thinking. And
> you may think about automatically moving elements, for example for
> shrinking PCB to minimal size. For that point papers may exist. Or
> another point, which I just remember: Unreachable areas on the board:
> The layer assignment algorithm does not take that into account when
> placing vias, because it does not really occur in chip design. But on
> PCB, there may exists barriers, for example elements may have outer rows
> of pads, so that putting vias in the inner area for routing side
> exchange makes not really sense...
>
>> > and most really do not like curved traces.
>> > Anthony already wrote that most people told him that.
>>
>> Well, I remember quite some "awsome!" shouts on the list every time
>> the
>> toporouter produced some new results.
>
> Yes, I can remember that. I think the more negative comments he got by
> private email.

:(
That is not part of being a good community.

> You can read German text, so maybe you have looked from time to time
> into the mikrocontroller.net forum? I have to admit that I do. Of course
> the people there are not really smart (with very few exceptions). But
> there it is common sense that they generally hate autorouters. And they
> hate curved traces, because it reminds to old handdrawn boards. That
> people care for PCB board colors and gold platings. And after some
> thinking, I can somewhat understand autorouter haters. There is the Ikea
> effect: You want to have build it really yourself. And for
> professionals: Autorouters may kill your job. Push and shove is more
> like an action game, people may enjoy it. It is similar like coding in
> Assembler 30 years ago, that time some people hated C. Here in Germany
> many people hates automatic gear shifting in their cars! I am sure in
> twenty years no one will still route manually. But I do not really think
> they will use our router then?
>

Manual routing will always exist because the amount of meta data you
have to apply to describe how you want all the parasitic stuff traded
around is substantial for heavy analog stuff. In those environments it
will often be faster to manually route than try to describe all of it.

-- 
Home
http://evanfoss.googlepages.com/
Work
http://forge.abcd.harvard.edu/gf/project/epl_engineering/wiki/

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