freerouting VS skidl

step 1: find a java project you want to compile. For the purpose of this post I'm using this one: https://github.com/freerouting/freerouting

I wanted a wireless crkbd, so I took petejohanson's ultralight corne mod and modded it even further — I added MX/Choc hot socket mounts. I used Freerouting app to wire the PCB automatically. It doesn't look pretty but DRC doesn't report any big issues.

The best thing to happen to KiCad was skidl [1] paired with freerouting [2]. You can spin a board in so little time it's insane. In the future I will be looking to automate even the parts placement too.

P.S. If there is interest I will look to document my workflow.

[1] https://github.com/devbisme/skidl

[2] https://github.com/freerouting/freerouting

View on GitHub

Running the excellent newly-multithreaded Freerouting under arm64 OpenJDK JRE 17.0.1 makes my 14" M1 Pro produce a whooshing sound that's really quite pleasant.

so far Autoroutering (specifically Freerouting) has never made any mistakes that weren't caused by me incorrectly connecting pins or placing components too close.

Great question! We hope we have a few good reasons.

This iteration of the project actually came after first working with and then modifying another awesome project called SKiDL (https://github.com/devbisme/skidl).

It's based on Python - but we found that because since it's procedural, turing complete and has a rich eco-system - people use to that and there aren't standard composable ways of designing things. Instead of describing your board, you (practically) write a script that generates your board. It entangles your targets with your source-code and can make it difficult to understand the ultimate outcome of what you've written.

Additionally, since it's a potentially very long program, it was hard to write good language support around (a language server for VSCode, a schematic visualiser etc...) that were snappy, responsive and lent to examining modules as well as the whole program.

There's a few operators and first-class language features we wanted as well, like units and tolerances (3.3V +/- 100mV) that just aren't the same when embedded in a string, or class init method.

there is skidl for schematics, but yeah shit was hand drawn before GUIs.

Further, there are many python libraries etc which can be used to design electrical circuits using code: https://github.com/devbisme/skidl

I'd like to see documentation on your workflow. You can also post it on https://github.com/devbisme/skidl/discussions.

There is a generate_pcb() function in SKiDL that will output a kicad_pcb file that can be directly opened using PCBNEW (no need to generate the intermediate netlist file). That function uses HierPlace to group the parts based on their hierarchical organization. That would be a good place to inject some autoplacement if you get it figured out.

If others are interested in this and wireviz they might also like to know about https://github.com/devbisme/skidl. Used to make schematic specification in python.

Kinda off topic, but there's this project called skidl https://github.com/devbisme/skidl allowing you to create electrical schematics using Python. It seems to council your two interests, maybe for a fun side showoff project.

Take a look at this SKiDL discussion forums on GitHub: https://github.com/xesscorp/skidl/discussions/129

SKiDL (circuit design library) does this to a very large extent...

https://github.com/xesscorp/skidl