Freerouter Help

I was using Freerouter, and it just doesn’t route the whole thing. I’ve left it for 2 days, and it still didn’t finish the board. What should I do? Are there any alternatives to Freerouter?

I have used many autotouters, but not Freerouter. It is not unusual for an autoroter to route less than 100%. Parts placement while displaying rat’s nest can help. Increasing the size of the pcb and/or reducing the number of components can be helpful. Editing routing rules may help. (All routers I have used use some form of routing rules). Finally, hand routing the unfinished routes is the final solution. Human routers are better than autorouters except for speed. Boards I designed had such a mix of cicuitry and requirements that I hand-routed boards. The package that I was using would not autoroute more than 2 layers at a time and the board was 6 layers with buried vias.

What other autorouters have you used?

Have you tried moving some of the components a little? When I have used this and it gets stuck sometimes all I do is move a few components around and it suddenly find a way to route the board - it may just need a bit more space here and there.

You can always let it route as much as it can then finish the rest by hand - if there are only a few traces left it may not take too long to figure out a way to route them.

Even with the auto router it is probably a good idea to think a lot about component placement.
Your aim while placing components is to reduce crossing of ratsnets.
If you have critical traces, route them by hand first and make sure the auto router can not change these.

Also always remember that finding the optimal solution for layouting a board is computationally in-feasible. And there might be contradictions that require trade offs. This is why layouting is still not fully automated.

All automatic routing tools can do is approximate a good solution. (With the information this tool has.)

I had tried to use an older copy of the freerouting.jar file on my newer windows 10 pc and it would not run.
I then found this… https://github.com/Engidea/FreeRoutingNew
and then click under the “deploy” folder there is a version that I was able to copy to my bin folder in kicad and it now works. there are a few good videos here… http://www.freerouting.eu/wpress/
and a pretty good kicad example video here http://www.freerouting.eu/videos/example-31-may-2016.ogv

Hope this helps (if not you then others trying to get freeroute working)
regards
dwight

The last one I used was Altium Designer on a 4-layer analog pcb. Some
others that I have used are Dash PCB, EE Designer III, Tango PCB. I have
used KiCAD but manually routed a small pcb. I may have used others but am
not remembering them.

Oh no, I’m using that, it starts, but it never finishes.