Here is the best route it could come up with after about 15 minutes… Not a good default behavior! So I bumped up all the the iterations so it would at least try. This first time I ran it, it finished in a couple of seconds with 12 unroutes. Shape based, optimal routing solution adapting to the natural flow of the nets while following advanced DFM and timing constraints. I’ll try on future designs to see if the magic lasts, and will report back here! KONEKT ELECTRA It gave me a usable (actually excellent!) design with only a couple minutes worth of work on my part. I will report if/when I am finally able to buy it! Conclusion: TopoR is very, very cool and gets so much so right. You have to register on the website to place an order, and the registration doesn’t seem to work. Unfortunately, it seems to be hard to buy. Even if it only worked on this design, it would have already paid for itself. Will this make them harder to inspect after reflow? We’ll see! Maybe there is a way to turn this off, but I can’t find it.Īfter seeing this output, I was ready to buy TopoR. I am a little concerned about the way the traces sometimes connect to the corners of the LED pads. Wow! I do so love the optimal directness of the traces! This is a nice route! It presented a layout with every trace routed and not a single design rule violation… Look at all those crazy topographically guided spiderwebs! After about an hour of my CPU blowing at full blast while I watched cat videos, TopoR suggested that it had done about all it could do. This is what TopoR looks like while routing…. Topographical routing with smoothly curved, minimal length traces. I’m guessing it would take me at least 10 hours to manually route this board, and I would be grumpy the whole time, and I would not be happy with the results because I demand better quality than I have the skills or time to be able to produce. Many (but not all) components on the board must be in fixed locations: This new version adds a Service Port so developers can talk to their programs at 0.5Mbs while debugging (way cool, right?!). It is basically an Arduino with RGB LEDs for blinking and IR LEDs for communicating. Let’s try out a few of the latest and greatest auto-routing programs to see how useful they are routing my new board! The BoardĪ new PCB for the Blinks gaming platform.

Why are we humans still wasting our time doing a crappy job at manually routing printed circuit board traces? If a computer can beat the best Go player on earth, surely it can route a mess of traces better than idiot me!

Diptrace arduino shield