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Subject: Re: [geda-help] Toporouter and vias
From: Stefan Salewski <mail AT ssalewski DOT de>
To: geda-help AT delorie DOT com
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 17:42:50 +0200
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On Fri, 2013-07-19 at 11:33 +0200, doragasu . wrote:
> I have experience on EDA tools, but I'm new to geda-pcb. While designing a
> two layer board to test it, I saw a youtube video demoing the toporouter

I guess Anthony has mostly concentrated on the rubberband part -- and
ignored the layer assignment algorithm (LAA). Generally it is the task
of the LAA to introduce new vias. It may be possible to manually insert
some vias, which Anthonys toporouter can use.

The LAA, as proposed in the PhD thesis of Tal Dayan is not difficult, so
maybe you or someone else wants to implement it -- it may be more fun
than watching videos. Unfortunately is is O(3.5) -- its an optimization
task, so it is not really fast for large layouts. 

You may have seen my own rubberband router -- it is written in Ruby,
works not too bad, but has currently only graphical PNG output, so it is
still absolutely useless.

I think, if you really wants autorouting, you may try the non
topological, geometrical router of PCB program, it is not bad. But of
course, most people seems to like manually routing better. It may even
be possible to employ the freerouting router of Mr Wirtz by Specctre
import/export? But that one is only free as beer.

The teardrops() may be not compatible with the topological autorouter?
I once used (tested) both, but separately. Last time is used toporouter
I got only crashes, that was two years ago, maybe it was a result of
switch to nm as PCB's internal units. Maybe that is fixed now. The
teardrops() is/was an external plugin, currently I can not remember how
to call it.