3 ms·

A lot of the routing work is in the placement, setting up components to make the routing as trivial as possible, and the autorouter isn't doing that for you. I

by m-ee 4y ago

A lot of the routing work is in the placement, setting up components to make the routing as trivial as possible, and the autorouter isn't doing that for you. I don't think it'll do pours either but I haven't used one in years. If it's a simple board with just some power lines and digital signals the auto-router will probably do ok, maybe faster than doing it by hand if you can reuse most of your rules. But if the board is that easy an experienced layout engineer would also make short work of it. Now what if the board is more complex? You have some sensitive analog signals, high speed digital signals, and some RF stuff that. Do you take the time to set up a room in Altium with special rules for the RF stuff? Make some complicated rules so that the high speed digital would mess up either of the other things I mentioned? Could be done, but the trial and error of getting all the design rules right is probably more work than just doing it. The problem is that easy stuff is easy, and doesn't need an autorouter. Hard stuff is still hard with the autorouter and unlikely to save that much time. It's hard to find a use case where you come out ahead. Maybe a board with a massive amount of GPIO and nothing else?

formerly_proven 4y ago
Back when I used Eagle the "oh boy that's so many pins of signals I care so little about" was pretty much the only time I found their autorouter somewhat useful. The remainder of the time I was annoyed because Eagle being essentially just a vector-drawing program doesn't have (or didn't, at the time) push & shove routing which made tweaking layouts so goddarn annoying, in particular because the tools to move stuff around were completely trivial (i.e. they just moved the selected vertices and made no adjustments at all). KiCad is imho way better in almost every way than Eagle (in the versions I am familiar with).
- Animats 4y ago
  I had that with the autorouter. I was doing a board that had one critical area, a custom switching power supply. The rest was slow signals. The switcher area had to be given a little extra space and some obstacles so the autorouter would do a tight job there. For the rest, whatever the autorouter did was fine. I, too, am amused by how wound up some people get about this. It's a tool.

by m-ee 4y ago

formerly_proven 4y ago

Back when I used Eagle the "oh boy that's so many pins of signals I care so little about" was pretty much the only time I found their autorouter somewhat useful. The remainder of the time I was annoyed because Eagle being essentially just a vector-drawing program doesn't have (or didn't, at the time) push & shove routing which made tweaking layouts so goddarn annoying, in particular because the tools to move stuff around were completely trivial (i.e. they just moved the selected vertices and made no adjustments at all). KiCad is imho way better in almost every way than Eagle (in the versions I am familiar with).

Animats 4y ago
I had that with the autorouter. I was doing a board that had one critical area, a custom switching power supply. The rest was slow signals. The switcher area had to be given a little extra space and some obstacles so the autorouter would do a tight job there. For the rest, whatever the autorouter did was fine. I, too, am amused by how wound up some people get about this. It's a tool.