[Roark66]

How's Kicad's autoroute these days? For anyone who says "no Pro uses autoroute" I can say electronics is a hobby for me and when I'm designing a PCB I like to autoroute first, see all the issues, then go back, move my components, autoroute again, once I arrive at optimal placement I do maybe 10% of traces manually (these are the ones autorouter does weird stuff with) then I let autoroute deal with remaining 90% of repetitive stuff. Finally I just tweak few things here and there. I think I tried kicad few years ago and I was back to altium very quickly. For typical hobby use one can't really afford altium so kicad is the only way to go, but if you can have it I'd choose altium every time.

[adql]

[1] There are options, but honestly I never seen the point for small boards. There just seem to be rarely the case where setup and fiddling with settings is all that faster than just routing few dozen traces.

I guess if I wanted to route something like big keyboard with a bunch of leds, but overall routing PCB is just such small overall part of the project that I just play some podcast in the background and play the PCB puzzle/sudoku challenge.

But then I like going back and forth and even changing schematic a bit to make routing nicer.

- [1] https://hackaday.com/2023/04/14/kicad-autorouting-made-easy/

[Roark66]

Ah, that java plugin.... I might give it a go this time. Last time I saw the word java and I decided against it.I believe I did test this plugin years ago when it came out first, back then it really was quite useless. As you said, it required fiddling with a ton of settings that meant just doing the damn thing by hand was quicker.

I would love to be able to do pcb design on my main Linux desktop rather than having to fish an old windows 7 work laptop with a copy of altium.

However, let me tell you my altium work flow with autoroute and small boards. Recently For example I was designing a Qfn44(7*7mm) to dip 44 adapter board. As simple as it gets really.

After drawing my rectangle board setting the only chip in the middle and two rows of pins.I just let the autoroute do it's job on default settings(it already has my minimum trace distance and thickness set) , I rip it all down, tweak few settings(trace neckdowns near pads), run it again. Repeat once more and the board is done all in under 5 minutes.

[adql]

Right but making adpater like that is like 10 minutes of manual routing max

[brusselssprouts]

There is now basic autoroute capability that works on a selection of traces. There is still no whole-board autoroute, and although in theory you could just select all items in the board and hit autoroute, it is not functionally designed to work this way.