OK, suppose I’m trying to make the autorouter in Eagle useful. I arrange components by hand with the airwires in place, and then I autoroute. I don’t like the results and wish to back up one step by ‘un-autorouting’ and iterate again.
Is there a way to do this other than saving the file at crucial moments and then reverting?
You can select any area (or the whole area) of your board with the Group tool and then right click in that area with the Ripup tool. I would imagine this would work with autoroute, even though I don’t use autoroute, personally.
Or if you’re a command-line oriented person, you can just type enter the command “rip;” to rip up all tracks, autorouted or not. If you’re trying to route a few tracks manually and then autoroute the rest, then undo just the autorouted tracks, I don’t think you can. I think you have to do the save/revert nonsense in that situation.
I couldn’t get brennan’s suggestion to work, but emf’s method worked just fine.
yeah, I think I’m done with autorouting before I’ve really begun. This is the first board software I’ve used that had it, so I thought I’d give it a shot. The artwork is really the most enjoyable part for me anyway, so why would I want to give that up? 8)
thanks!
Good luck :wink:OK, suppose I’m trying to make the autorouter in Eagle useful
Unfortunately, I don't think there is. It sounds like you do the same thing I do: hand-route, save, auto-route, reload.Is there a way to do this other than saving the file at crucial moments and then reverting?
Instead of auto-routing all the wires at once, try having the auto-router route only a few at a time (use the ‘Select’ button in the auto-router window). If you do it that way, you don’t have to rip up a whole board of wires, only the few that you routed.
Andrew02E:
Instead of auto-routing all the wires at once, try having the auto-router route only a few at a time (use the ‘Select’ button in the auto-router window).
:idea:
Ah-hah! this is slick! Now I’m rolling! thank you.
I have a habit of hand routing everything that I consider crucial. Especially anything that needs beefier traces. Once I am happy with that, then I run autorouter on the rest.
A few things I always do when placing parts:
Place connected parts as close to each other as possible. Example: If you have two caps tied to a PIC and a resistor tied to the other side of the PIC. Place those parts on the respective side of the PIC. That prevents traces having to be “jumped” under the PIC to make it to the connected pin.
I also constantly click the “Ratsnest” button to always shorten the airwires to the shortest possible runs. This really helps the autorouter find the best route.
You may already know these things, but I thought I would just share my $0.02 
No all of that was great advice, and much of it I didn’t know.
I too will be hand routing the crucial parts. The wave guide for the GPS antennae would likely never work if it were auto-routed (unless I specified the wire width and places the connector ‘just so’ 
)
I’m also doing the power supply, so I can provide my usual ‘rail’ system.
Thanks for the help everybody, this is a great forum. I buy all my gyros etc from Sparkfun BTW