Tracks and vias already on the board were ignored, so other nets could
be routed straight through them (the flight controller's 82 GND
stitching vias and its guard tracks). They are now copper of their net:
other nets keep a pad's distance from them in the grid, the exact check
and the room engine, and they add no connections to route.
A route may not leave a cell inside a wire keepout as a wire, nor reach
a pin there by one: it changes layer instead, and the via goes in the
pad. A pin whose every stub enters a keepout is reached by a via only.
A structure keepout named rule_area... (mckicad names KiCad rule areas
so) is checked for overlap only, as KiCad's DRC does, with the free ends
of each wire tested for their round caps.
freeroute ignored the DSN's planes (KiCad's zones), so it never knew that
pads in a pour are joined by it. On the rc4 power stage those pads sit
inside "keep router off" areas as well, and every connection to them was
dropped without a word.
- Read (plane <net> <shape>) and put each zone on the board as a
ConductionArea of its net. Zones are not obstacles: KiCad refills them
around other nets' copper.
- The grid groups each net's pads and zone pieces that copper already
joins (a pad in a zone, two zones sharing a pad) and routes only between
groups. A connection may end on a zone by a via inside its copper, or by
a track where tracks are allowed.
- wire_keepout now blocks traces only, as KiCad's "no tracks" rule area
does; via_keepout only vias; keepout both, in the grid and in the exact
verifier.
rc4 power stage, exact engine, resolution 2: 2 unconnected, down from 8
(FreeRouting JAR: 12), no DRC errors.
- The exact engine verified copper per net and dropped a whole net on any
conflict: a 25-pin +3V3 net lost every connection to one bad segment.
Verify and accept per ratsnest connection instead.
- Pad and keepout cells were rounded outward, blocking cells up to half a
step clear of the copper; 62 of the 64 pins of a 0.5 mm pitch LQFP could
not start a route. Block only cells whose centre is inside the clearance
zone, and let a net walk along inside its own pad, which adds no copper.
- Routing was bounded by the outline's bounding box, so tracks cut across
rounded corners. Keep the DSN boundary as a polygon; the grid blocks cells
too close to it (scanline plus per-edge, precomputed for vias) and the
exact and room engines reject copper that is.
- --edge-clearance MM sets copper-to-edge clearance, e.g. KiCad's
min_copper_edge_clearance, which the DSN does not carry. Default 0.
On the TerraHawk rc4 power stage the exact engine now matches the
FreeRouting JAR: same open count, no DRC errors, with a 0.5 mm edge rule.
Measured against KiCad's own pads on the TerraHawk rc4 power stage:
- Back-side parts kept their pads on F.Cu (32 pads). Mirror the copper
layer for a back-side part.
- Pad outlines were copied unrotated (29 pads on rotated parts). Place the
outline through the same chain as the pin: pin rotation, back-side
mirror, part rotation. Oval pads, a path with a width, came out as a
zero-height sliver; pad them out by the aperture.
- Multi-shape padstacks used the first shape; use the largest.
- Footprint-level keepouts were parsed but never placed. KiCad exports a
mounting hole's plated ring that way, so the router could not see it.
- Vias were sized like a trace (0.25 mm square for a 0.6 mm via), and every
remaining short and clearance error was a via. Read the size from the
DSN's via padstack and use it in all three engines; the grid engine now
reserves the cells a via's copper reaches.
With these the exact and room engines route that board with no shorts,
clearance or other DRC errors. Pins now carry their component reference.
On the TerraHawk rc4 power stage every engine misread the board's rule areas:
- A no-track ring along the board edge arrives as one keyhole polygon, and
keepout polygons were wrapped in a single convex tile, so the ring became
the whole board. Split keepout polygons into convex pieces instead.
- The grid engine rasterized an area by its overall bounding box, which for
that ring is again the whole board; it routed nothing. Rasterize per tile.
- "Keep router off" rule areas arrive as wire_keepout, which the reader did
not know, so tracks ran through them (172 DRC items_not_allowed). Read it
at board and image level. For now it blocks vias too, which is stricter
than KiCad and cannot create a violation.
- place_keepout only restricts part placement; stop treating it as copper.
The oracle now runs the JAR headless; it was opening FreeRouting's GUI on
the desktop for every oracle test.
Ports the data model of the board Item hierarchy (Item base, Pin,
ObstacleArea/ConductionArea, Via, Trace) and BasicBoard (layers, nets,
clearance, bounding box, items with query helpers), then build_board:
the load-bearing integration that constructs a BasicBoard from a parsed
DsnBoard.
build_board maps layers -> LayerStructure, resolution -> transform,
default clearance rule -> ClearanceMatrix, nets -> Nets plus a
(component,pin)->net map, padstacks x placement -> Pin items, and
keepouts -> ObstacleArea items. Rectangle pads become exact IntBoxes,
convex polygon pads exact Simplexes, circle pads their bounding box
(documented approximation); every pad is centred on its pin location so
it contains that location by construction. Trace/Via are router-produced
and lightweight here (an imported unrouted board has none).
Validated on a real KiCad export (kicad_routable.dsn): layer/net/pin
counts match the parsed DSN, every pin's pad shape contains its origin,
every pin reports a valid net, and pin locations lie in the board
bounding box. An oracle-gated test cross-checks that every net the
reference FreeRouting JAR routes exists on the constructed board.
rsp2k