Autorouting is a neat and awesome feature because you have to do little to no work and computer does all the thinking for you, but is Eagle's Autorouter all that great? I would have to say that it is okay at best. Once you have gotten X amount of components per inch it is so bad it is nearly unusable.
Before any routing.
After Eagle's Autorouter. ~30seconds
So what else is out there? After reading through some forums I found a program called FreeRouting. After reading the Freerouting Eagle User tutorial I was stuck dead in the water. Their brd_to_dsn.ulp file did not work within Eagle 6.1, so some digging was in order. Here is a link to the file that will allow you to use FreeRouting in Eagle 6.1. This program has many benefits but at a price, computation.
Pros:
- Routes pins that Eagle gets stuck on
- Professional look
- Cross Platform
- Free
Cons:
- Not Open source
- You have to have internet access
- Runs on Java6
- Doesn't seem to be Multithreaded
- Takes much much longer than Eagle Autorouter
So is it worth all the extra computational power and time? I believe that it is, but I will let you be the judge of that.
As of right now I have been routing the board pictured above for the last 2 hours and FreeRouting is still chumming away. I will post a picture as soon as it has completed.
UPDATE:
Just finished the auto routing in FreeRouting... if you were counting it has been about 5.5Hours, but look at the difference.
UPDATE:
Just finished the auto routing in FreeRouting... if you were counting it has been about 5.5Hours, but look at the difference.
