Finished up layout and routing today, and finally found something kinda hmm... about KiCAD. KiCAD doesn't come with an autorouter, and while of course routing by hand is important for some things, its nice to be able to have one. They recommend using FreeRouter, which works well, but there were some hoops to jump though, like installing some other tool just to get FreeRouter, dealing with JRE on Windows10 in 2019, etc. Also, there was some weirdness when trying to do a ground plane fill then using the auto router. I ended up finding that the workable order is hand route, auto route, then fill. Also, it would be nice it you could do circular keep outs in addition to polygons. Minor quibbles over all.
In related news, my first shipment from Adafruit showed up. I'm going to build a rev 0 controller out of a Pi Zero and their joystick hat, just to get used to how kRPC on a Pi should work. There was some sort of a mishap at the packing warehouse, so I'm missing a couple of small parts, but they included an extra Pi 4, 4GB. I'm going to set it up with Octoprint to get my 3D printer back up and running.
And, while I wait for parts to show up, it's time to get back to my asteroid detection ML project. Maybe I should do a write up here about it.
Discussions
Become a Hackaday.io Member
Create an account to leave a comment. Already have an account? Log In.