Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

Re:Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code by 4b11b4 on Monday February 05, 2024 @11:04PM (#39270638)

you can do this with the Freerouting plugin

it's non-trivial, you need to fiddle with parameters to encourage the autoroute towards certain behaviors. there are also some schematic patterns that lend towards better netlists and in turn better routing

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Re:Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code by fxtentacle on Monday February 05, 2024 @11:57PM (#39270946)

In general, yes, but when I tried it, all free autorouters (and the paid one in Altium) failed to do the fan-out/escape of the ESP32's BGA.

I then built a little CLI tool which used bitmap images and ConvNets to do just that one fan-out, but then I lost interest in it as soon as the PCB was finished.

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Re:Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code by ranger_danger on Tuesday February 06, 2024 @12:22PM (#39277287)

I really wonder why autorouters are so bad/slow still, I at least understand the high level concept of what it should be able to do, and I would think that with enough input parameters, this shouldn't be that hard of a problem to solve, especially with how easy it is to deploy tasks across lots of powerful machines for (relatively) cheap these days.

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