The router began as a port of FreeRouting and has grown its own engine
(negotiated congestion, tree nets, exact checks, axis escapes), and
'freeroute' was one letter from the project it no longer follows. The
package, module and command are now rpmroute; the freeroute command stays
as an alias, and the RPMROUTE / RPMROUTE_ORACLE_JAVA variables fall back
to the old FREEROUTE names. Version 2026.10.07. Routing is unchanged: a
PCBench board routes to a byte-identical session either way.
Committed vias were checked for hole spacing, but a route's own vias are
not committed until it is done, so a route hopping layers (more of them
on 6 layers) could put two of its vias 0.41 mm apart, as th-eda's
6-layer flight controller showed. A via is now also checked against
layer changes earlier on its own route.
A fixed via sits anywhere, not on a cell centre, and may have a bigger
drill than the router's via; checking hole spacing between cell centres
with one drill let the flight controller's routed 0.2 mm via come 0.19
mm from a hand-placed 0.25 mm one. The board now carries each fixed
via's drill (from KiCad's padstack name), and cells are checked against
fixed vias exactly.
A route could drop a via next to (or onto) a through-hole pad of its own
net, where it changes layer for free, and a via reusing a fixed via's
cell came out a little off the fixed via's centre, beside it. No via now
goes within hole spacing of a through-hole pad of any net; a via in a pad
is checked exactly against every via and hole; and a routed via on a
fixed via of its net is not written. charge-sense: 4 hole_to_hole to 0;
flight controller: 2 to 0, unconnected unchanged.
The exact engine rebuilds its output from each connection's own vias,
so connections sharing a plane via each wrote a copy: th-eda's flight
controller had 71 spots carrying 2 to 4 vias of one net. Vias are now
written once per net and spot, and never on a via already on the board.
Every pin of a supply drops its own via to the plane, and nothing kept
two of them apart: the flight controller came back with 199 co-located
holes and 109 hole-to-hole errors, nearly all VDD_3V3 and GND. A via now
keeps its drill plus --hole-to-hole (default 0.25 mm, KiCad's) from
every via centre, fixed ones included, except an own-net via at the same
cell, which it reuses; such a via is written once, and none is written
on top of a via already on the board.
rsp2k