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0 pointsur-whale6y ago0 comments

I'm not depending on an auto-router, which is why I went through the exertion of adding the word "rough" in my post. Auto-routers are a very nice time saver to get something going quickly.

Also, you have strictly no idea what kind of design I'm working on and therefore no idea what constraints - or lack thereof - I have to deal with when I design boards.

Finally, I've heard so many boomer EDA folks spew out this lame argument ... it's the same old tiresome song from folks who use to claim compilers could never beat hand-crafted assembly. They're very seldom heard from these days.

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mdszy6y ago

If you have design requirements that warrant using an auto-router, I don't think you'd be posting on HN asking for it in an open source CAD package.

No, they're not for getting anything going quickly. Route it yourself so your boards don't look like absolute garbage. Unlike a compiled programming language, aesthetics matter, and you get no optimization from an autorouted board unless you're doing something like routing the exact same trace a hundred times over for some super simple parallel bus.

Which, again, I'm pretty sure you'd know what you were doing enough to not ask about an autorouter feature on HN if that were the case.

This coming to you from an early 20's "boomer".

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