29 Mar
2016
29 Mar
'16
5:18 p.m.
I just finished laying out the board for the MEM11A. The last roadblock was figuring out
where the last 3 unrouted wires were. EagleCAD didn?t make it easy to find them and I
haven?t quite figured out how to use the autorouter on Eagle 7.5, so I did this all by
?hand?
(at just under 2000 wires it took a while).
I haven?t re-set the grid from all of the other boards (all thru hole parts) that I?ve
done,
so this board is probably not optimal (plus I was getting the hang of doing a 4 layer
board).
I ran into a lot of wiring congestion that caused me to reroute the entire board as I
moved
parts around. Even with a finer grid pitch it?s unlikely that the UMF11 will fit on a
single
SPC board.
I?m going to check the board over for the next week or so before I send it out and about
4 weeks after that I?ll have the first boards that I can populate and try out!
TTFN - Guy
29 Mar
29 Mar
5:25 p.m.
On Mar 29, 2016, at 8:18 PM, Guy Sotomayor <ggs at
shiresoft.com> wrote:
I just finished laying out the board for the MEM11A. The last roadblock was figuring
out
where the last 3 unrouted wires were. EagleCAD didn?t make it easy to find them and I
haven?t quite figured out how to use the autorouter on Eagle 7.5, so I did this all by
?hand?
(at just under 2000 wires it took a while).
I can imagine. Hand-routing tends to produce much better results; the autorouter in
EagleCAD isn't all that good. A simple way to find the not yet routed wires is to
turn off the metal layers but leave the "ratsnest" layer visible.
paul
5:50 p.m.
On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 8:25 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
Yep.
On Mar 29,
2016, at 8:18 PM, Guy Sotomayor <ggs at shiresoft.com> wrote:
...autorouter on Eagle 7.5, so I did this all by ?hand?
(at just under 2000 wires it took a while).
I can imagine. Hand-routing tends to produce much better results; the autorouter in EagleCAD isn't all that good.
Yep.
A simple way to find the not yet routed wires is to
turn off the metal layers but leave the "ratsnest" layer visible.
I can suggest triple-checking for unrouted wires. I have a small PCB
design I sent out that had *1* unrouted wire segment, between the
crystal and the pad at the MCU, so short, I couldn't easily spot it
even after several sessions of looking at it and running ERC.
Fortunately, there's a handy via _right there_, but each board from
that run needs a hand-added ECO wire (something I used to do for a
living 30+ years ago). v2 is 100% correct! Lesson learned.
-ethan
8:27 p.m.
On Mar 29, 2016, at 5:50 PM, Ethan Dicks
<ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 8:25 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
Yep.
I had reasonable luck with it previously but I would route critical signals
by hand and let the autorouter finish everything else.
On Mar
29, 2016, at 8:18 PM, Guy Sotomayor <ggs at shiresoft.com> wrote:
...autorouter on Eagle 7.5, so I did this all by ?hand?
(at just under 2000 wires it took a while).
I can imagine. Hand-routing tends to produce much better results; the autorouter in EagleCAD isn't all that
good.
Yep. A simple way to find the not yet routed wires is
to turn off the metal layers but leave the "ratsnest" layer visible.
I can suggest triple-checking for unrouted wires. I have a small PCB
design I sent out that had *1* unrouted wire segment, between the
crystal and the pad at the MCU, so short, I couldn't easily spot it
even after several sessions of looking at it and running ERC.
Fortunately, there's a handy via _right there_, but each board from
that run needs a hand-added ECO wire (something I used to do for a
living 30+ years ago). v2 is 100% correct! Lesson learned.
11:10 p.m.
From: Guy Sotomayor: Tuesday, March 29, 2016 8:27 PM
These 3 wires were *really* short. Nothing I did
found them until I came
across a ?trick? which is to zoom out so the board is tiny and then with
the route tool active, just ?click? on spot on the board. In short order I
found all 3 remaining wires. Using that technique, I found the 3 remaining
wires in less than 5 minutes (vs the over an hour looking for them last
night).
Cool tip!
Have you tried the "zoom-unrouted" ULP? That should center the
display on one of the unrouted traces. From there you can turn
off the routed layers, pads, etc and zoom in more until you find it.
Repeat as needed for additional unrouted wires.
A good choice of placement and routing grids should minimize these
problems, but of course picking a proper routing grid is non-trivial
when a variety of odd (metric and imperial mixed?) spacing is involved.
Vince
5:51 p.m.
I've never used EagleCAD but some CAD packages let you turn off all routed
lines
On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 5:25 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
On Mar 29, 2016, at 8:18 PM, Guy Sotomayor
<ggs at shiresoft.com> wrote:
I just finished laying out the board for the MEM11A. The last roadblock
was
figuring out
where the last 3 unrouted wires were. EagleCAD
didn?t make it easy to
find them and I
haven?t quite figured out how to use the
autorouter on Eagle 7.5, so I
did this all by ?hand?
(at just under 2000 wires it took a while).
I can imagine. Hand-routing tends to produce much better results; the
autorouter in EagleCAD isn't all that good. A simple way to find the not
yet routed wires is to turn off the metal layers but leave the "ratsnest"
layer visible.
paul
2971
days inactive
2971
days old
5 comments
5 participants
participants (5)
-
ethan.dicks＠gmail.com -
ggs＠shiresoft.com -
paulkoning＠comcast.net -
pete＠petelancashire.com -
v.slyngstad＠frontier.com