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Comment by the-dude | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, in Soviet Russia, traces square you : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopoR

You can't combine Soviet Russia and PCBs without linking to the fantastic http://www.zachtronics.com/kohctpyktop-engineer-of-the-peopl...

This game is also contained in the ZACH-LIKE collection:

> https://store.steampowered.com/app/1098840/ZACHLIKE/

(hint: it is free (as beer) ;-) ).

Oh wow, I did not know about this and it's awesome. Thank you!

That stuff is great. Once in an embedded SW shop I received some prototypes routed like that. It was unexpected! I couldn't stop smirking and showing it off to everyone around :)

Maybe it got lost in translation, but I'm curious to what an "embedded software (?) shop" is?

A company that writes firmware for small electronics.

Let me modify that correct response by saying it's a company that writes firmware for embedded processors. They are not necessarily small: I've worked on embedded systems that used multiple Pentium-class processors that distributed the hard real-time work to a few dozen smaller (8 and 16-bit) processors.

How do you ensure the proper requirements for routing analog circuits, high-speed digital circuits, or RF circuits are satisfied in a freestyle routing?

Simulation.

Don't use a router for a critical circuit paths.

Interesting. I really enjoy manual routing though. For a small board it can be a fun game :)

I self taught PCB design a couple of years ago, settled for KiCAD and freerouting(.net).

After the prototype revisions, it was very easy to move to 100% SMD and let the autorouter do its job ( design for manufacturing ).

My only problem with the auto router (in EAGLECAD at least) is that it ruined your undo/redo history! So basically if it screwed up you had to tear the entire thing up, or go back to an old save.

It still is a huge time saver though!

It is said that each and every EDA tool sucks in its own ways.

I concur! They are all highly complex pieces of software each with years of design cruft and their own foibles. I've yet to try any of the "heavyweight" ones like Altium because I don't have a megacorp footing the bill, but certainly of The free ones they all have issues. I personally like and use kicad but agree that it still has some serious usability issues (though a LOT of progress has been made with >5.0) it has some features that i wouldn't give up for the world (push and shove routing for one) and some I despise (library management still blows) and on balance I prefer it to the restrictions of eagle (free) but for knocking up a quick board, easy eda is pretty handy to have on hand wherever I may be that I can't install the others on. it's full featured enough to not suck as much as (say) fritzing

I designed a PCB with KiCad in 2014-2016, with version 4.x and then had to make another one in late 2017, and gave KiCad another spin and am absolutely mind-blown as to how awesome it has become. I even opened up my old designs from '14 and they just worked, some complaining about an old version, but it got all the footprints (lots of custom ones, too!) right and I could just pick up and continue.

I'm not sure how KiCad scales up to the $10k+ EDAs, but I am thoroughly amazed at it's quality and useability, especially considering that it's FOSS.

It is known

I had the opportunity to try out a bunch of them, including Altium in the late aughts and I was struck by how much worse the user interface got the more expensive the EDA software was. Eagle, free for student use, was the only one where when you used the mouse wheel to zoom it zoomed with respect to the mouse pointer location instead of the center of the screen. If they supported mouse wheel zooming at all.

I think this is closest we have got to the Uncanny Valley [1] in PCB layout...

But seriously, this type of any-angle/arc routing can be very effective and is often seen on IC interposer/package substrate routing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

I dunno, I think it's way past that because no human would/could do anything complex that looked like that. What's the word for when computers do something that looks weird but is actually just way better than what you could come up with?

Magic?

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