There was a quite recent post on hackaday regarding the freerouting plugin. Normally I hate auto-routers, but I have a new design and thought I would place components as I thought best, then autoroute to test my placement, tweak, and auto-route again. I knew it was going to be difficult route - and this test might make me decide between a 4 or 6 layer design.
Went through the installation procedure (I’m using Ubuntu 20 and KiCAD 7.0.2). Got Java 17, installed Freerouting via the Plugins Manager. Placed components. Freeroute… immediate bomb out with an error. I don’t have access to my dev PC at the moment to give the exact error (I think it was a Java library access error). Better than a crash I suppose!
I ended up manually routing the PCB, but it would have been interesting to run Freerouting anyway.
Interested to know if this is a “me” problem (perhaps Ubuntu 20 doesn’t like Java 17?), or a more generic problem with the Freerouting plugin?
Freerouting is not connected to KiCad. We simply provide a convenient interface to it.
There are several variants of Freerouting out there to try to keep up with Java changes.
You can try to dig a bit by accessing Freerouting from the command line
Too true. I’m in no way implying that any problems I’m experiencing with Freerouting are a KiCAD issue, more that a KiCAD forum is probably a good place to discuss.
Although Freerouting is a separate entity, running it as an ‘integrated KiCAD module’ seemed an easy way to check it out. I’ve seen multiple attempts at auto-routers over the years (Protel, before it became Altium, and a stupidly priced package called ‘veribest’), but none were ever any good. Algorithms have improved (including “AI” attempts), and now so much computing power can be shoved at the problem that what would have taken hours back when EDA was newfangled has become seconds.
To me, routing a PCB is like solving a giant jigsaw puzzle. I prefer hand routing and find it very therapeutic. My biggest criteria (behind functionality of course) is aesthetics - my design HAS to look good, and autorouters just can’t do that… yet (maybe not ever).
The extent of the “integration” is simply a one-click equivalent to Export DSN, Run freeRouting, Import SES. That’s all. I’ve been doing those 3 steps manually all along, the second via the CLI specifying the file directly instead of having to navigate to it via a file chooser.
Hence the recommendation to check the second step from the CLI to make sure it’s not a Java environment issue.
Ubuntu 23.04 installs the headless jre by fefault
Freerouting can use graphics, so I tried installing the default-jre package and the Freerouting plugin now seems to work