This version was unable to route my board

[rogerclarkmelbourne]

Hi

Thanks for putting time into this updated version, but for me, currently it doesn't work nearly as well as the original version.

The original version routed the board in about a minute

I'm just doing a simple board with 3 modules, one is 40 pin one is 18 pin and the other is a 14 pin (SIL), and I had to stop it after 15 mins making birds nest of tracks and wires and bizarre routes.

I can send you my DSN file if you want...

[Engidea]

If you just do autorouting, the older version is "better", the aim of this new version was to reliably being able to go back and forth from Kicad pcbnew a few times.
The issue is really at the core of freeroute, really hellish to solve, basically, freeroute cannot stand two consicutive "points" (unless on a differente trace) and it so happens that when you import from Kicad a few "points" disappear.
To solve this you need to "autoroute", but without messing the board.
So, I had to try to "force" the autoroute to be "less aggressive" when fixing the hundered of connections that where almost done, but not quite.
Also, standard autoroute is not smart enough to handle a proper ground plane, a real issue whan dealing with simple double sided boards, so, I normally route by hand since that is the only way to have a good ground plane.
So, what is next ? Ideally the first step is to get rid of rational numbers and the limitation of no two consecutive points in a line, that would make data exchange way more reliable.
Then another things would be to implement some "spring" concepts into the distance between tracks (at the moment the clearance logic is way too imprecise)
But the above is big, if not because the handling of geomery is quite "complex".
Clearly Alfons is a smart fellow and the resulting work is quite "articulated", not easy at all to change the foundations...
Also, at the moment it is just me and the push and shove code in original Kicad is getting better (althought still way jittery than Freerouting)
Anyway, thanks for your comment, and I am happy that you can continue to use the old one, this is freedom at work !!!

[rogerclarkmelbourne]

@Engidea

Thanks for the reply.

I use aurorouting then often manually re-route some tracks

FreeRouting makes a pretty good job.. Its better than KiCad's built in autorouter, but it does some things which I find strange.
But I'm sure the logic is very complex, and not easy to change....

Anyway, thanks again for your work.

[iltis42]

IMHO its not a problem of freeroute, but of the java version used on your machine.
In my experience its not properly working anymore since Java 11ff, hence you may simply fix that by download Java 8, e.g. jdk-8u241-linux-x64.tar.gz and alter in deploy/run.sh the java call to just using the version that was fine at time when freeroute was tested fine, e.g. i did:

#!/bin/sh
exec ~/FR/java/jdk1.8.0_241/bin/java -jar FreeRouting.jar "$@"