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by seveibar 443 days ago
We will absolutely be supporting KiCad! Placement is something we have big plans for but I think it’s important to have a really fast, cache-friendly autorouter as a foundation (if you are cache friendly, moving components and trying different layouts is much much faster)

Javascript is fairly portable now with many runtimes (some even quite small such as QuickJS or Proffor), so I anticipate people will be able to run locally and build their own ginormous cache :)

I think everyone should be concerned about lockin and fragmenting ecosystems in EDA, but tscircuit and our autorouter are MIT-permissive technology (very rare in EDA) so we play nice (interoperable) with everyone.
3 comments
micw 442 days ago
> We will absolutely be supporting KiCad

I wonder why there's no standard API for autorouting so that a particular EDA must be supported. I'd love to see autorouter as a standardized HTTP endpoint so that I can run one locally or even buy Autorouter-As-A-Service. E.g. I'd happily pay for TopoR¹ as a service for some projects while others are fine with classic rouing.

¹) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopoR

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seveibar 442 days ago
Software innovation in EDA seems pretty slow and is more IP-sensitive, so there hasn't been a huge proliferation of cloud services. We're trying to bring some up some standards that make EDA more web-friendly, like the Circuit JSON[1] format and the Simple Route JSON format[2], but it'll still be years before the tools support web-first standards (kind of reminds me of png vs webp)

[1] https://github.com/tscircuit/circuit-json

[2] https://docs.tscircuit.com/advanced/simple-route-json

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buescher 442 days ago
The de facto standard external autorouter workflow is through specctra files.
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micw 442 days ago
At lease easyeda has support for http based autorouter endpoints. They seem to wrap a version of freerouting in this protocol
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_fizz_buzz_ 443 days ago
How are you planning to support kicad? Would it be using kicad's new IPC API? In principle it should be possible to create javascript bindings for the new protobuf interface.
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seveibar 442 days ago
We are looking hard at the IPC interface or doing a plugin, but we will also support “uploading” kicad_sch/kicad_pcb to a browser (local-first, so not actually uploading)
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cushychicken 443 days ago
Hey - take a look at my other reply to u/ChrisGammell - I have some input on your project you might find useful that I don’t feel like retyping lol
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