FreeRouting on Mac seems broken

[awardblvr]

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

[Rene_Poschl]

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.)

[awardblvr]

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?

[awardblvr]

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

[davidsrsb]

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.