3 ms·
To my knowlege there is no practical way to automate placement AND routing of a PCB design (so basicaly only the a netlist as input). Yes, there are autorouters
by sonium 6y ago
To my knowlege there is no practical way to automate placement AND routing of a PCB design (so basicaly only the a netlist as input). Yes, there are autorouters, but they work under the assumption that there is already a sensible placement of the compontents. Is this still true?
At least Mentor Graphics & Altium don't seem to have any solutions for this.
- DHaldane 6y agoThis is still true for all off the shelf autorouters.
- kelnos 6y agoNot sure if it's true, but SparkFun's platform still appears to require manual design, just it looks like their staff will do it for you. To test-drive it I selected an ESP32 with a humidity/temperature sensor, and it quoted a board cost of ~$35, with a one-time ~$1k design fee. So presumably they give the component list to a real human who does the board layout for you.
- StavrosK 6y agoWhy would you want to? Routing is the fun part!
- duskwuff 6y agoIt can be automated if your requirements are limited and your expectations are low. I think that's the approach SparkFun are taking here -- aside from power, the only connections needed are between the components and the microcontroller, so placement is kind of arbitrary, and they leave themselves enough room that even a terrible autorouting job will work.