Freerouting is integrated now? (solved)

I installed a new version of Freerouting (1.9.0) and had to hunt around to find where it went. It’s installed under KiCad now - the old version I had was part of LayoutEditor. I am guessing this means it is somehow integrated into KiCad but I can’t figure out where to find it in the menus. The Tools->External Plugins choice is empty. What’s the new way to run it?
Thanks,
Lloyd

Application: KiCad Schematic Editor (64-bit)

Version: (6.0.11), release build

Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.2.1
libcurl/7.83.1-DEV Schannel zlib/1.2.13

Platform: Windows 10 (build 19045), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW

Build Info:
Date: Jan 26 2023 07:02:30
wxWidgets: 3.2.1 (wchar_t,wx containers)
Boost: 1.80.0
OCC: 7.6.2
Curl: 7.83.1-DEV
ngspice: 38
Compiler: Visual C++ 1934 without C++ ABI

Build settings:
KICAD_USE_OCC=ON
KICAD_SPICE=ON

No it’s a separate project. The plugin may happen to use the KiCad user directories. So issues with Freerouting should be reported to their GitHub site, not here.

PS: You may wish to consider upgrading to KiCad 7.

Thanks, I prefer to stay a full release behind, that’s worked well for me so far.

Thank you for telling me how to run it. It immediately threw a Java exception. I went to the Github page for Freerouting and saw that they require a different version of Java, from the Eclipse people. When I loaded that and used it to run, Freerouting worked well and quickly.

Lloyd

Evidently you stayed too many Java versions behind. But Java versioning is a dog’s breakfast. It was 1.x for an eternity, then it jumped to 5, and now 21 is the LTS, with 17 the pentultimate. Fortunately my distro supplies a sufficient recent LTS version without any effort from me.

Java version hell is just one reason why Freerouting is unlikely to get merged into KiCad

Well there’s no reason to anyway. It has a different set of developers, it’s not KiCad specific, using the DSN/SES interface, and there are questions about whether it’s truly unencumbered.

2 Likes

Those are some of the other reasons

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