Mail Archives: geda-user/2015/10/16/10:57:33
Maybe I missed that, but there was so much traffic on this list in the
last months that I was able to read only a very small fraction.
An autoplacer has the advantage, that it may be useful also for people
who wants to do manual routing. And for autorouting it is an important
component. Another point is, that even a bad autoplacer is useful for
initial part distribution, so all the arguments people have against
autorouter are not valid for autoplacers. And development may still be
some fun. For an autoplacer some support by schematics tool would be
really useful, for example grouping of elements: An OpAmp with its two
resistors and two bypass capacitors should build a group, indicating
that these components belongs together. This is important for the bypass
capacitors, because their pins both belong to very large nets, gnd and
power, so location is not determined by net. For signal paths, nets
should include generally only two or very few pins/pads, so that placer
can use that information to place components at the correct initial
position. Another point is, that it would be useful when footprint files
would contain a bounding box for occupied area -- pads, pins and silk
may be used for that, but exact box may be better, maybe not only a
rectangular box, but a polygon or circle.
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