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Subject: Re: [geda-user] GTK3, Glade interface designer (router, auto?)
From: Stefan Salewski <mail AT ssalewski DOT de>
To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
Date: Tue, 06 Oct 2015 20:45:56 +0200
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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.

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?