Autorouting... Yes Again

Hello all.
I think I read every post and page about integrating “FreeRoute.jar” into KiCad.
Except none of it works.

I “exported” the PCB as a DSN as instructed… so it’s ready.

The “https://freerouting.org/” site has a youtube that is old. The comments say the button to launch the autorouter is gone, but just run the “run Freerouting via the executable I have you download too” …? What executable?

I pulled the entire “Layout” package and moved the JAR file are instructed. I tried to manually launch the JAR file but it threw a Java exception about Unsupported major.minor class. I don’t know what version is required.

I launched the whole “Layout” Package, from the batch file Start.bat… Layout.bat… And LayoutEditor.bat files all did the same thing, it brings up a GUI. But the file load doesn’t have a DSN file type. But I can load a Kicad_pcb board file…

But the YouTube shows a menu option to Autoroute… Well, that’s not there either.

There is a GitHub (https://github.com/random-builder/kicad_freerouting-plugin) which tells me to use the client. I don’t have “git”. I don’t want “git”. I pulled the zip down, but there is nothing that tells me how to install it. Juts tossing the folder from the zip into the plugins directory doesn’t do anything. (for that matter, what are the requirements? Perl? Python? Php? Java version?)

I could continue to describe the hours of things that didn’t work… That’s a waste of my time and everyone else’s. What does work?

freeRouting is not integrated into KiCad anymore after v4. Any video showing that is out of date. I’ve never tried the integration plugin, I just run freeRouting manually beside KiCad. I should add the disclaimer that freeRouting is not part of KiCad.

If you want freeRouting the package in Layout is out of date. If you search this forum you will find a link to the official site with a JAR built for recent Java environments. Run the JAR and open the DSN file. You may have to navigate to the project directory to find it.

Here’s the official site: https://freerouting.mihosoft.eu/

Freerouting is not part of the KiCad project at all.
Thanks to some legal doubts and its use of Java it won’t be merged any time soon

Thanks. I am aware it’s not part of the KiCad project.
It’s all the other “here’s how to integrate it” tutorials that don’t work I’m slogging through.

Ken Yap, that worked perfectly. I did the install, loaded the tutorial board, ran it, and hit save.
Nothing there… So I tried again, and this time did the “Export Session File”, and imported it.

The only other concern was it didn’t create any desktop shortcut, or didn’t do that “plugin”. But that’s not a show stopper.

So, for anyone else, use this router.
https://freerouting.mihosoft.eu/
From the PCB Layout Editor, just do the “Export DSN, run the router, Import DSN”

Thanks guys!

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You mean import SES of course.

Shouldn’t be difficult for someone to cook up a desktop launcher. I’m on Linux so I have a script where I provide the DSN file as an argument so I don’t have navigate to the directory; it runs in the current directory.

One gotcha is that if you change any of the track widths by assigning nets to classes you should answer No to the first popup Please confirm importing stored rules, otherwise you don’t get the changed width but the cached one.

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