I just started using fritzing to make schematics and PCBs of my little arduino projects.
I find the software incredibly well done, complete and easy to use.
I encountered a problem though, which I hope might be related to my stupidity.
I set up the sketch with an arduino, a microSD reader and a generic DC power supply, connected everything and clicked the autoroute button. Nothing happened, the autoroute simply did nothing.
I upload here a screenshot after clicking the autorouting button.
Please tell me if I am doing something wrong, I don’t really want to perform hand routing…
I had to look this one up because basically no one uses autoroute, or at least no professional uses autoroute. Autoroute only autoroutes ratsnest(dashed) lines.
Autoroute was invented in the 80’s when each layer of a board only had traces running in one direction, ie top layer all East to West, bottom all North to south, which is simple enough that someone invented an autorouter to do it. Now that no one uses that method anymore, autoroute is pretty much redundant. Maybe that $80K software has a decent autorouter, but you can guarantee that most of the complicated boards you will see are all manually routed - expensive programs have a push trace feature to make manual routing faster -, and that probably includes your PCs motherborad.
Experts will buy $10K of Altium software but will manually route everything, because they can do a better job than $10K of autoroute.
