Re: gEDA-user: autorouter fixes and enhancements (Harry Eaton)

[Anthony Blake <tonyb33@xxxxxxxxx>]

Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:
> Are these instructions valid for the "new topological autorouter" too? By 
> the way, when is this autorouter going to hit the streets. Or at least be 
> acessible for beta testing? It's been almost a year since the gSoC 2008. 
> With this sub project I feel like having smelled the good food but then 
> xnot allowed to actually taste it.

Haha. No, the toporouter is a bit different. It has been taking a long 
time because I don't have a lot of spare time to spend on it, and I 
didn't want to spend a lot of time polishing and stabilizing something 
which works, but only has OK or not so great results. Instead I've been 
trying to build something which has great results before putting a lot 
of effort into polishing and optimizing.

It is slowly getting there though. Here are some shots of Harry's LED 
board, with two different net ordering heuristics:
http://wand.net.nz/~amb33/toporouter/LED.png
http://wand.net.nz/~amb33/toporouter/LED-layerhint.png

All nets were routed with no vias. After seeing Harry's results using no 
vias, I realized there was a problem in my net ordering which was 
resulting in some big detours. It's on the list of things to fix.

I've also been playing with automatic length matching: 
http://wand.net.nz/~amb33/toporouter/matching.png - Now I have an idea 
about how to do it better.

BTW, if anyone wants to help, adding the ability to remove and insert 
vertices in the GNU GTS CDT code after building the CDT would really 
help, and is out of the way of what I'm currently working on. This would 
enable via's to be added by the toporouter.

At the moment, I'm in the middle of three changes which are going to fix 
a lot of problems, at which point it might be ready for some people to 
start playing with it, although it is still a way off from being usable. 
I'll keep everyone posted.

Thanks to Harry, DJ & Dan for helping out.. pointing out problems, 
testing some of the dodgey code, and with their suggestions.

-Anthony



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