Autorouting approaches

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1

Hi,

This is a newbie question. Having done some search, I am not sure what is the right/mainstream way to do it. Do I have to use a plugin? Are there alternatives, and what is the easiest? KiCad 5

Thanks in advance

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I use FreeRouter (aka FreeRouting), it’s an external Java program. KiCad sort of has support for it, but since the FreeRouting website closed it requires some manual installation. Personally I just start FreeRouting outside of KiCad, and use the import/export functions in KiCad directly.

Since FreeRouter is no longer supported by the author, there are several alternate versions, the one I use is https://github.com/nikropht/FreeRouting

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This one does not look very much alive either.

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Almost none of the FreeRouter forks are “alive”, in the sense that there are being actively maintained. There are a few issues with FreeRouter but none that really bother me. I made a few tweaks to the code. Generally it works well enough.

The question really is “which fork has been most recently updated to be compatible with my system”. Some of the recent forks have made a lot of changes in ways I don’t like, so I don’t use them.

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Thanks! Mere dropping freeroute.jar in /usr/bin makes it integrated, as it turned out:

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