freeroute exited 0 and said nothing when it dropped connections, which
cost real diagnosis time: on rc4 two simple two-pin nets came back with no
copper and no explanation. The grid now records each connection it could
not route, the exact check adds each it rejects, and the CLI lists them on
stderr (the SES is still written; the exit code stays 0, as the JAR's).
A connection whose ends both sit in one zone of its net is listed apart,
as left to the zone fill: freeroute does not route through a zone it
cannot trust to be solid, but KiCad's fill often joins those pads anyway.
A zone outline is where copper may go, not where it ends up: on the rc4
sense board the board-wide GND pours break into islands around other
nets' tracks, and treating every pad inside them as connected left 28
GND islands unjoined (63 unconnected against 42 without zones). Trust a
zone only when a no-tracks rule area covers it on its layer, as the
power stage's pours are covered; route the rest with tracks as before.
rc4, exact engine, resolution 2: power stage 5 unconnected (JAR 12),
sense board 41 (JAR 32), no DRC errors on either.
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 grid search estimated the remaining distance as a straight line even
when only orthogonal steps exist; Manhattan is the tighter estimate those
moves admit and still never overestimates. --heuristic-weight W (default
1) makes it weighted A*: routes at most W times the shortest (tested).
A cell was exactly one trace plus its clearance, so a trace owning its cell
was the whole clearance model, and the 0.4 mm grid could not reach most
pins of a 0.5 mm pitch package: between two 0.3 mm pads a trace's centre
has a legal band only 0.15 mm wide. Resolution K makes cells K times
finer and has every trace claim a halo, the cells whose centre is nearer
than trace + clearance to one of its own, released again on rip-up.
K = 1 has an empty halo and is the old grid exactly (tested). On a 0.5 mm
row, K = 4 gets every pin out where K = 1 gets two. On the rc4 boards, K = 2
cuts the sense board's opens from 66 to 41 (JAR: 32) and the power board's
to 7 (JAR: 12), still with no DRC errors from freeroute's own copper.
Every route starts and ends with a stub from the pin to its first grid
cell, and the grid never saw that copper: on the rc4 sense board 24 of 39
connections the exact verifier rejected had a later route pass beside an
earlier stub. A route's stubs now claim the cells they come near, a stub
must be clear of other nets to be used, and a route may start from any
enterable neighbour of the pin cell, costed by stub length (Manhattan on
the orthogonal track, so a pin on a cell centre still leaves straight).
Tests: a route near a rounded corner keeps its edge clearance; and a
strict xfail that pins down the remaining gap, a 0.5 mm pin row the grid
cannot give a column to every pin of.
SES lengths and coordinates were written in the DSN's unit while the
session declared (resolution um 10), so readers that follow FreeRouting's
SesWriter (KiCad's importer, mckicad's ses_apply) placed every track at a
tenth of its size. The JAR, run on the same DSN, writes F1 at 65000 where
freeroute wrote 6500.
Scale every length by the resolution factor: placements, via padstack
shapes, wire widths and points, and vias. Rotations stay as they are. The
router tests compared SES output against DSN pad positions and so had the
same mistake built in; they now derive the expected values through
ses_scale.
Add diagonal_win.dsn: a 45-degree pin-to-pin net with a keepout placed inside the
diagonal's bounding box but clear of the true thin copper. Orthogonal routing
connects it with a Manhattan-length staircase (1600000); diagonal routing
replaces that with a single 45-degree trace at the ideal hypotenuse length
(1131371) -- a 29% reduction -- DRC-clean via the search tree and via an
independent reconstruction of the emitted 45-degree copper's clearance octagon.
test_exact_clearance_is_load_bearing shows the keepout overlaps the coarse
bounding box but not the exact octagon, so the exact clearance (not the box) is
what lets the diagonal route. Determinism, endpoints-on-pads, valid SES, and
diagonal-off-equals-orthogonal (additive, over four fixtures) are covered.
Add channel_pack.dsn: three nets whose pads spread wider than a wall gap, so they
must converge and pack into lanes. Plain room routing (shove on or off) drops >= 1
net under every net ordering; the packer connects all three under every ordering,
DRC-clean (search tree and independent emitted-copper check).
The falsifiable boundary test sweeps the gap width for N=3 and N=4 and asserts the
packer connects all N iff the gap meets the geometric feasibility width
(N-1)*(width+clearance) + 2*(half_width+clearance), never routes fewer than greedy
below it, and never false-packs. Determinism, endpoints-on-pads, valid SES, and
pack=False-equals-default (additive) are covered.
Add true_density.dsn: NET_C is a full-height wall on the sole signal layer,
so plain room routing drops a net under every net ordering (an order-independent
obstruction, verified over all permutations), unlike rooms_shove_channel whose
plain drop fits under a reorder.
Test that shove recovers nothing on this board (shoves == 0, same routed set as
plain) while staying DRC-clean, and that the only difference from the recoverable
shove_channel is the wall's span. shove relocates a blocker into existing free
space; where the wall leaves no headroom there is nowhere to relocate to, so it
cannot manufacture density. The recover/fail boundary is the free-space boundary.
_shove_recover_room clobbered a net's _Accepted with a fresh one whose
wire_owners held only the just-recovered wire, while its wires list (the
shared result.wires[net_no]) already held earlier committed connections.
That left wire_owners shorter than the parallel wires list, so a later
net's shove either removed the wrong wire's copper from the search tree
(a silent different-net short: copper stayed in the emitted SES but
vanished from the tree, and has_violation falsely certified it clean) or
raised IndexError and aborted the whole route.
Reuse the net's existing _Accepted on recovery so wire_owners stays
parallel to wires. Fixes both the silent DRC violation and the crash
sibling without touching the DRC-clean or determinism invariants.
Also correct the overstated "density win" framing of the shove_channel
fixture: its plain-routing net drop is an artifact of greedy net order,
not a density limit (the same board routes both nets with zero shoves
under a reorder or with the cosmetic seals removed). Reframed the test
and docstring; the genuine sub-cell win remains the wide_door occupancy
packing (shoves == 0).
Regression tests assert the invariant against the emitted output
directly (reconstructed copper tiles), not just the tree that the bug
fooled, plus determinism, no-crash, and the ordering-artifact bound.
rooms_shove_channel is the headline density win: a sealed NET_A wall
leaves no top<->bottom door, so plain room routing drops NET_C; with
shove=True NET_A is nudged aside and both nets route, DRC-clean and
deterministic. rooms_wide_door seats two nets through one wide gap at
distinct projected gate points with no shove.
Cover the occupancy-aware projection math directly, assert the four
foundation fixtures stay byte-identical under shove=True (shoves==0), and
extend the room DRC-clean parametrize with both new fixtures.
Adds narrow_channel.dsn: a keepout wall with a narrow gap positioned off the
routing grid, so no grid cell centre falls inside the gap's free centreline.
The exact/grid track drops the net (cell quantization can't fit a centreline
in the channel); the continuous room track routes it. This is the headline
result that continuous free-space beats the grid.
Tests: the room router's output is DRC-clean (exact has_violation is None) on
simple/crossing/kicad/narrow_channel; it connects simple/crossing (with a via)
and all four multi-pin KiCad nets; traces are orthogonal and end on pads; and
the continuity contrast asserts exact routes 0 while rooms routes 1, both
clean. Oracle-gated connectivity parity on simple/crossing.
Adds shove_needed.dsn: one signal layer (no vias), where NET_A routes as
a straight wall that boxes NET_C out under greedy ordering. Tests assert
the contrast: without shove NET_C is dropped (result still DRC-clean, just
incomplete); with shove NET_A is moved aside and both nets connect, the
exact has_violation check is clean, endpoints stay on pads, and the result
is deterministic. Regression tests confirm shove is a no-op on the simple/
crossing/ripup/kicad boards (same connectivity, DRC-clean, zero shoves).
Oracle-gated parity is included (skips when the JAR cannot route the
synthetic single-layer board).
Adds route/exact_router.py: routes with the grid track's rip-up/multi-layer/
via topology search in orthogonal mode (axis-aligned segments -> exact IntBox
copper), then verifies clearance exactly against a ShapeSearchTree. A net
whose copper would come closer than the clearance to any accepted item is
dropped, so the emitted geometry is DRC-clean by construction; endpoints stay
exactly on pads and vias at real layer transitions.
GridRouter gains a non-breaking orthogonal option (4-connected). The pipeline
gains an engine= selector: 'grid' (default, unchanged, highest coverage) or
'exact' (DRC-verified). The grid MVP stays the fallback.
On the designed boards the exact track routes every net DRC-clean; on the
real KiCad board it matches the grid's connectivity (4/4 multi-pin nets) and
is DRC-clean where the grid MVP's widened centrelines are not. Deferred:
shove, and 45-degree/IntOctagon trace caps.
Tests: the exact router's output has no clearance violation (exact IntBox
check) on every fixture; endpoints on pads; traces orthogonal; crossing uses
a via; and a direct comparison showing the exact track is clean where the
grid MVP violates on the real board. Oracle-gated parity for engine='exact'.
Adds ripup_needed.dsn: one signal layer (B.Cu is a power plane, so vias
are impossible) with two nets whose greedy order strands NET_B, but where
rip-up reroutes NET_A around NET_B to connect both.
Tests: greedy (rip_up=False) leaves >= 1 connection unrouted with no vias;
rip-up connects all with no vias; the result is deterministic across
re-runs; rip-up keeps endpoints on pads and produces no same-layer cross
between nets (ripped traces leave no orphaned occupancy). The crossing
board's single-layer test now targets the greedy path explicitly, and a
regression test asserts the real KiCad board still connects all four of
its multi-pin nets. Oracle-gated parity added for the congested board.
Adds crossing_2net.dsn: NET_A is a full-width horizontal wall and NET_B's
pins sit above and below it, so single-layer routing cannot connect NET_B
but two-layer routing succeeds by dipping to the other layer through vias.
Tests assert the multi-layer invariants: single-layer routing leaves a net
unrouted with no vias; multi-layer connects both nets with >= 1 via; the
SES contains a via scope; every via sits at a real layer transition of its
net's path; trace/via endpoints still land on the pads; traces stay on
valid layers and within the outline; and no two different nets cross on the
same layer. Oracle-gated parity tests cover the simple and crossing boards.
Implements a working autorouter and the Java-free replacement for the
freerouting.jar step: dsn_text -> parse_dsn -> build_board -> route ->
write_ses.
GridRouter is a single-layer A* maze search over a uniform occupancy
grid: a cell is blocked by another net's pad (inflated by clearance +
half trace width) or a keepout; each net's ratsnest is connected pin to
pin; a routed trace then blocks other nets. The cell path becomes a
trace polyline whose endpoints are the exact pin locations. Board-unit
paths are converted back to DSN units for the SES (wire (path ...))
scopes.
This is an MVP, not a port of FreeRouting's expansion-room maze:
free-space rooms, rip-up-and-retry, multi-layer via search, and shove
are deferred (they raise quality/coverage, not the connectivity
milestone). It reaches connectivity on boards whose nets route on one
layer without crossing.
Adds tests/dsn/fixtures/simple_2net.dsn (a guaranteed-routable 2-net
board). Invariant tests: both nets route, the emitted SES parses, every
trace stays on a valid layer and within the board outline, and every
routed net's trace endpoints sit exactly on its two pads. An oracle-gated
test asserts connectivity parity with the reference FreeRouting JAR on
the simple board.
rsp2k