I’ve spent all day trying to get past the DRC bot. I’m using Eagle 4.16 and I am using autoroute. I can get the board routed with all the clearances at 12 mil and the thickness at 10 mill. However, every time I send the files I get the 8 mil or clearance error. I can see the yellow error parts and on wires and vias, but they don’t appear to be too close together. Anyone have any ideas or have come across this problem?
Stevyn:
I’ve spent all day trying to get past the DRC bot. I’m using Eagle 4.16 and I am using autoroute. I can get the board routed with all the clearances at 12 mil and the thickness at 10 mill. However, every time I send the files I get the 8 mil or clearance error. I can see the yellow error parts and on wires and vias, but they don’t appear to be too close together. Anyone have any ideas or have come across this problem?
I had a bunch of problems too, but moving my ground plane clearance to 12 mil fixed it up. I still have traces with 8mil clearance here and there, but 8mil clearance between the ground plane and everything else was too much.
I’m not using a ground plane, just top and bottom layers. I just mess with the component placement and do autoroute. I set the DRC up to 14 mil spacing and certain traces or vias still come up yellow on the DRC bot. Here are the top and bottom layers sent back from the DRC bot:
http://www.tcnj.edu/~pompeli2/1155843970-GBL.jpg
http://www.tcnj.edu/~pompeli2/1155843970-GTL.jpg
The offending areas are close to other traces, but above 8 mil so I don’t know what the problem is.
Stevyn:
I set the DRC up to 14 mil spacing and certain traces or vias still come up yellow on the DRC bot. Here are the top and bottom layers sent back from the DRC bot:http://www.tcnj.edu/~pompeli2/1155843970-GBL.jpg
http://www.tcnj.edu/~pompeli2/1155843970-GTL.jpg
The offending areas are close to other traces, but above 8 mil so I don’t know what the problem is.
Stevyn,
I can’t say I have the magic solution for you, but I’ve had similar frustration with EAGLE and BatchPCB (although I think all tool vendors and board houses have their share of hiccups).
I’d suggest two experiments, which you may already have tried.
(1) Turn off all the layers in EAGLE and display only 19 Unrouted, 20 Dimension (your board outline) and turn off the grid.
Ideally, you should see no yellow ‘ticks’ - unrouted trace segments.
What I’ve found (the hard way) is that sometimes a trace does not attach to a pad correctly, for a variety of reasons, and a minute segment is left unrouted.
(2) Rip up one (or more) known bad traces, restore the airwires, and route the traces again by hand. Compare the DRCbot plots before and after. If the previous error is removed, repeat this for every other one and you should pass DRCbot.
At that point, and for grins, you can reduce your spacing and try the DRCbot again.
I hope this works, Comments Welcome!
Peter
I got it down to less than 10 errors on each side and just manually moved or fiddled with the spaces between traces and pads and vias. It wasn’t that difficult and I should have tried this earlier. I was hoping to find the correct settings in Eagle to do this automatically, but a little manual routing to clean things up is still a lot easier than routing everything by hand.