FreeRouting on Mac seems broken

Mac OS 10.12 (Sierra), Kicad (version info below)
Downloaded latest FreeRouting.jar as part of https://freerouting.org/freerouting/using-with-kicad
Latest Jave Runtime and JDK’s installed… System rebooted cleanly after all installs.

When I start the FreeRouting.jar and open up a freshly .dsn file, I get only:

Does ANYONE have a version of FreeRouting working on a Mac alongside Kicad 5 files?

What am I missing?

Application: kicad
Version: (5.0.2-5)-5, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.4
libcurl/7.54.0 SecureTransport zlib/1.2.8
Platform: Mac OS X (Darwin 16.7.0 x86_64), 64 bit, Little endian, wxMac
Build Info:
wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (UTF-8,STL containers,compatible with 2.8)
Boost: 1.68.0
OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
Curl: 7.51.0
Compiler: Clang 8.0.0 with C++ ABI 1002

Build settings:
USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=ON
USE_WX_OVERLAY=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
KICAD_SPICE=ON

No need to give kicad version info. Freerouting is not part of the kicad project. (Never was, never will be. Mainly because of licensing concerns and wrong language used.)


The original freerouting package is not maintained as far as i know. There are now many different branches around that all have slightly different feature sets. Some of them might not support all the new features added to kicad version 5 (I seem to remember that rounded rectangle pads are a problem for some branches of it.)

1 Like

Is there any way I can export the .dsn in an earlier format so that I can use SOME version of freerouting? Can anyone recommend a version of FreeRouting that WILL work under Mac OS with output from Kicad 5?

Solved it all myself… Here are my self-notes:

Kicad Autorouting… PITA

Get this package

https://github.com/hedefalk/freerouting

Unzip and then run

bash gradlew assemble

Then to execute: iTerm2 to

/Users/user_me/Downloads/freerouting-master-hedefalk/build/lib

run

java -jar freerouting-executable.jar

AND THE REST IS SELF-Explanatory…

Now for a little extra-credit… To make all this easier… I have relocated

freerouting-executable.jar

to

/Applications/KiCad

Background:

I have to launch the above from a terminal… Not so good… So I created a script to launch it.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

java -jar /Applications/KiCad/freerouting-executable.jar

Then I (1 Time) saw appify: (https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/shell-script-mac-apps)

and put it in /usr/local/bin … so that I can

appify autorouter.sh "Autorouter"

which turns the shell script into an app:

SO now life is easy

Sooner or later Freerouting is going to stop working, either because of Java changes or the details of how KiCad works.
As it is written in Java, has a different code licence and some controversy about its origins, it is very hard to merge it into KiCad.

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.