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.
Resolution 2 reaches 0.5 mm pitch pins and cut unconnected items on both
rc4 boards; since lazy via checks it costs about 2x in time, not 4x.
The grid engine keeps 1, the old grid exactly.
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.
- 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.
Add the GPLv3 text (the package declared the licence but never shipped it),
a py.typed marker, and an sdist include/exclude allowlist so the distribution
carries only src/, docs/, README, LICENSE and pyproject. reference/ is a clone
of the GPL FreeRouting Java tree kept purely as a porting reference and must
never be redistributed inside this package; tests, caches and build output are
excluded too.
Switch to the PEP 639 SPDX licence expression with license-files, widen the
classifiers, and add an -o alias for -do. Rewrite the README around the engine
matrix: what each track and pass actually does, and what this is not (no
FreeRouting density parity on dense boards, and --diagonal is a recovery and
shortening pass, not a diagonal-native search).
The grid MVP was the only track reachable from the command line, so the
continuous room engine, channel packing, shove, and 45-degree routing were
unusable by anything shelling out to freeroute.
Add --engine {grid,exact,room} (default grid, unchanged behaviour) plus
--pack / --shove / --diagonal, and honour -mp on the tracks that implement
rip-up passes. Not every engine supports every pass; ENGINE_OPTIONS is the
matrix and an unsupported combination exits 2 with a message naming the
engines that do support the flag, rather than silently no-opping.
The pyproject declared a freeroute script but freeroute.cli was missing, so the
entry point was broken. Add it: reads a Specctra .dsn, routes (rip-up on by
default), writes SES. Accepts FreeRouting-compatible -de/-do flags so it can be
dropped in wherever 'java -jar freerouting.jar' was called.
rsp2k