Hi, just a quick follow-up to my previous video which I'll link in down below if you haven't seen it. where I basically took you as a walk through the entire process of laying out this Nixie tube PCB that I've done here and that was like an hour and 20 minutes worth, And it was. It seemed very popular, but one of the common questions I got was a lot of people wanted to know what would the auto rather produce what this layout would look like if we actually let the Altium autorouter run on this thing that I thought well that's an interesting questions, so I thought we take a look at it. So Here is my manual layout.

that's it's. fairly neat and tidy. is not the most optimal optimal thing in the world, but you know I look it's got the high-voltage bus along the top there 460 volts or whatever. It's got the ground plane in there, it's got the serial clock lines, you know, going right through like that.

instead he could be people do all over the board so you know there's a couple of you know night manual routing touches in there. And as people know, I'm not a big fan of autorouters, I don't suggest you use them, but there are times when you selectively. Actually when I was a professional full-time PCB Layout engineer I would often selectively use the autorouter so I did not order out certain parts of it. Never, ever professional.

PCB Designer does not auto route an entire board that they use is selectively and sometimes you can spend hours or days setting up the autorouter to do, you know, precisely what you wanted it to do and it can actually help in those regards. But people want to know what would happen if I just let the auto router rip on this board and I thought well you know that's interesting. Haven't used the auto- Altium Autorouter for years. This is the new - the latest - Altium Designer 17 that I've got instilled here the full package.

This is not Altium CircuitMaker or CircuitStudio, it's a full professional Altium Designer. Now Altium Have never had the best or around are on the citizen Auto. Rather I think this deal calling it's always been pretty new. you know I mean it's and hasn't got a lot of fans but I thought we'd give it a rip.

So what I've done here is I have just made a duplicate of the board. so I haven't changed anything but I've simply unrounded everything and that's what you can go. You can just go under out all I nets and just get rid of everything and so that's what I've done I've got rid of everything. So I'm actually going to let it do the whole kit and caboodle of the ground.

The power. Everything. The ground is gonna be horrible. It's going to be ground traces everywhere.

It's going to be missed. but I thought we'd rather exactly the same circumstances and compare my manual route with the audio rerouted version. So let's give me go. So the first thing we're going to want to do is going to round up here or out there we go and we want to order out all now.

I would love to simply exclude the you know the ground yet or something like that might be able to do that. I haven't set up any Nick classes or anything like that, but anyway, we're going to order out all here now. I've got my the rules I had before: 15 sale clearance and 10 cell track. I've got my video set up exactly like I had it when I was doing the manual routing going here and you can edit all of the rules.

You know you can go in there around envious style, the clearance and all that. so the jazz but I've I've got that all already set up as per my manual. route should be identical and we've got several versions here like several different our pre building algorithms the default to a wonderful to lay with edge connectors default multi-layer general noggin all we'll just go with the default to layer board because that's exactly what we've got here. but yet you can go in and you can edit all sorts of stuff.

You can lock any pre rates down here that you are might have had for example. so if you already have partially around the board you don't want to rip up your stuff and things like that, but we're going to do the whole thing. So here we go. I am going to run this entire order out.

Can I actually clear, clear or messages There we go. So the myth images up here should show up wall itself around. So let's just go ahead. We might be able to do some more optimized routes and stuff later selective reading and things like that, but let's just go around at all and sealed against little bit.

Why do a half reasonable job for a lot of stuff? But I suspect the grounds to be awful of course and you know it. Probably the traces run all over that. maybe it won't even complete the route or whatever. But God will give it a go, shall we? So here we go there.

We default to layer board throughout all. Go go to steal the silver and go there. We go around 81 of 237 connections. Reality at fifty percent is it really doesn't look like it that you can see like ground around here.

You can see that like that that's actually ground there. They're actually directly ground. Look, it's doing a horrible job of this ground. like it's just a complete balls-up right? so you don't want to wrap around typically as you saw when I was doing my manual railing, you would only want it to I Yeah, you leave the ground to left and then you flood.

Feel that in later. you actually polygon that feel that in So it's not about helping that we're actually routing the ground you. This is why you just never go route all on your board Unless you absolutely have to have it done in five minutes and you just didn't give a rat's arse, then that's the only time that you would route all. so you definitely wouldn't want to route your ground.

but pair of course Here you wanted to create your power and that. but you can see that trace going that that red one going here. This is missing soldiers ground. I Mean it's just like it's cutting off heads and doing what not and it's not going to be great.

But here we go. It's already got some contention up here. You might see some traces like overlapping each other. It'll tidy all that stuff up when it's done that.

Yes. So now if you not started off are all guns blazing and now it's a it's really trying to figure it out and you can see the redness changing their but now it's looking and I like if you take away the ground issue it's looking like me. Okay and I it's doing something. It's not going thru horribly wrong at the moment but will be interesting.

Yeah, we definitely want to set out. You know you might want to set up a net. Classes only do selected nets and things like that. You can like a route, an individual component for example, and stuff like that.

so it's ideally for setting up. this and wanted to do was around I wouldn't include the ground of course I probably wouldn't include the power I probably wrap the power myself I'd actually pre route the power and then I would just leave everything else on its own. But yeah, we get there 207 of 238 connections starting layer pattern. So this is the general two-layer algorithm it's using and you know you can set up our by the way I forgot to show you there was it.

Setup for automatic direction are on both the positive and bottom, top and bottom layer, but I with an emphasis on the vertical direction for the top layer which is the red one here and you'll notice that it's doing mostly vertical stuff with the red there in terms of like going to the mix, achieve and stuff like that and it's kind of doing more a horizontal emphasis on the bottom layer which is the blue layer there. So apart from that red ground one we saw there, it's generally following those rules so it's doing it, you know, in the same way. I would have approached it manually when I did approach it manually around this thing. The top layer I did most like vertical and then the bottom layer kit for more horizontal type stuff.

So here we go. It's struggling and struggling on screen capture and I've got a nice 77 double 60 United three-and-a-half key. You know, very decent computer here doing this thing. You know, order routing takes time, but hey, if it works for you, it can actually save you some time.

And as I said, selectively auto reading stuff has worked in my professional I experienced laying out stuff, but I never would let it do this amount of you know, a full board or anything like that. But hey, if you have to have been born out five minutes and it works right into kind of United's low-frequency stuff to be awful, you know you wouldn't take pride in that. But if you just have to get something lashed together for a one-off thing that you have to absolutely send away today, you know, or in the next couple of hours here, you know you might let it do this. and you probably have no choice, right? because the manually wrap this might take you know, 23 hours or something like that.

And if you want to send it away with an hours notice because then you'd miss the deadline on the PCB manufacturing, you wouldn't get a blah blah blah then you know sometimes you may not have a choice. Or if you simply don't care, trust me. Learn. Decay.

Take some pride in your layout. That work. We're almost there 227 of 238 and I might as well walk alone for the rest of it because we're We're getting there and well, you know it doesn't. It's not like you know there's all garbage down in these dead space's here.

it's sort of, you know said okay y-you know I Don't need to route ridiculous stuff all over here and it's it's doing ik well. You know this right angle crap in here might do. It might do a clean up our past the end or something like that, but it's doing Kv. screen capture software is going to slow this side down as well.

Of course it could easily double with time that it takes just because it's got a screen capture this whole thing in the background. But come on, you can do it. You can do it out him Sitters auto rather. I It's kind of fascinating to watch it go though.

I do enjoy watching our order rather do their thing and but not theirs all. I'm always going to have an issue with it regardless of what you do, what in result is always going to be something pretty hard in there. but electrically everything should be fine. It's going to meet the design rules, the clearance to trace with everything else and all the next we're going to be joined.

Suppose sometimes it just will back itself into a corner because it doesn't know what it's doing. You know it. It's just given up ripping up traces and rerouting the minute news. And yeah, there might be because this is a little bit tricky in terms of like cross tracing that you know traces going off that way and this way and crossing and stuff like that so it might not be able to complete a couple.

But here we go to 31 of 238 So it's really taking its time with these last ones because of all the congested spacing there. You know it's just to solve one now. takes time to 32. There we go.

Actually I'm not going to stop now. I'll come back when it's done. We are done and routing finished with zero contentions but it failed. They go failed to complete six connections in seven minutes and 41 seconds and you can see the ones that actually failed to do.

You can still see the whites retinas here. so residents. oh look, I mean not like like it didn't even try to get them to. come on, I can do.

I can see easily. my human mind can see where that's easily going these 210 he could easily go up here like this and then look. they can even look at the direct path right up here right around here. just move, that would be it.

and Bob's your uncle of that. I mean it's got like two easy right and it said I couldn't complete that and likewise this one he look it couldn't figure out how to get this trace up here through here through here like this because this light, you can fit two between these pads just because of the clearance rules. anyway. even if you don't have to, this one could have moved.

As you know, my human mind is like I Look, this one instantly can move out here like this even if we have to go through heat but it couldn't figure out how to get through their get through there. shove this over a little bit and then go connect there because it got caught on this via here right? It just got completely caught and didn't want it. determined that had to move too much stuff and do too many things and make too many decisions to move that veer up there. you know I Like yet whereas I just tidy that up in a minute or two right? Fixed as a you know a human router so like and and this one Miami you know this one I Drop the video down to the bottom.

see this one here right? I haven't even looked at the rest of it this one here I would immediately how I fix it immediately. drop here on the top side, drop it down to the bottom side. you can see we can route this trace your right up to here then I bring it to the top side again. keep around running the trace up here and where does it have to go to? its going to go to that one up there.

Ok so would have dropped it back down here because we're boxed in and dropped it down here at the bottom layer. Take it up here and then take it to the top side again and here and we have to get around to there. But even you know you drop it down again another layer and take it across. I Mean you know I can fix that in 10 seconds, right? So yeah, and look at you, it's left these horrible angles like this.

like like I hate this as that's just an acid trap as they call it in the business. When you put into the acid etch bath, then you know the acid can bubble around in there and it can exit, etch away excess stuff on there. A professional PCB designer would not have a back angle like that. I'm a 90-degree angles and generally frowned upon just because.

right? even though that you know this like acid trips generally out the big deal these days with modern etching techniques and stuff like that. They're done it down here as well. But you know, just like if you did that, if you're a professional designer and you submitted for designer of your board that looks like that, you know you just get laughs that'll get the sack or something. And I know professional designers gonna have angles like that in the board just because.

Yet this like it did it just fine and we're all no look look see look at. This to trace is shorted overlapping each other Are that you shouldn't have shown up as a contention or whatever. That's ridiculous right? It's completely screwed up there like down here as well. What their help our? sorry that's me.

See that that's the same net. Okay, but that's just like it's hard right And and why is it determined that it needs two traces in here for the ground? I'm invested. It's just ridiculous. And what's going on here with this angled trace Like that? they actually come on.

it should have stopped them. I do pretty shocked like it's done like the United the 45 degree angles and everything for most other stuff like some of its not bad you know, like you know these down here and stuff like it is doing a reasonable job at this is a lot of meanness in there. like yeah. anyway in this six routes that couldn't complete even though it's trivial to see like this one he give me a break like instantly without like to start.

one second glance I can see that you can bring this trace up here like this. bring it around outside here up. oh I'm sorry ya up around here like this and then go in and back through here. and today I mean that was like like like a half second glance at that showed me where that route was obvious you know? I So bloody computers there.

I'm not worried about the the singularity and of course the other. our order reading thing you can do is to route individual Nets like this one that didn't complete for example. So you can just go order out and then you can go individual knit. So just one minute of the time after the one pain in the ass thing you got to get from one side of the board of the other.

Than often it can be handy for the non-critical trace just to let the order router do that so we can give that girl to see if it can see if we can do that. Thank you very much. And yep it did. It did not.

There we go, It went down there at the horrible right angle thing. They're a little turd there and they're in hotel. but then he jumped over to here and then it jumped over there and down to there. But it did that.

Why couldn't do that as part of the order. Round of white said this was the completed order around. bored why it said it couldn't complete that I'm unreadable when it could easily just go ahead and do it as a single route ads. you know algorithm file and there's a whole bunch of other order routing our stuff you can do I You know areas, room and the net classes as we have.

take a look at component classes and all sorts of stuff. You can set up individual rules for each one and it can get quite complex. Over said a professional using and order a selective order around honor. really you know important complex board would you know I Spent many hours just you know sitting up and make sure they get the order of our tribe.

they might even give it a couple of goes and stuff like that to you know using different rules to see if they can give it to do it but this is a mess that listen with with a bit little bit throughout it down to hear what but yeah the same net. Okay so they're allowed to be on top of each other but are that's the clock line? Ok so this is one of the clock lines. look at this so you know my nice one for example. like you go over here ok select the world going on for and then turn there we go like my one.

You know you saw that mere out that in the video. You know those nice to traces that you might around these before you actually start your order out. For example, letting your order out, rip and look what it's done I mean it, You know it. Of course you can force it to prioritize these and and stuff like that you can get real complex with your rules and stuff like that.

if you thought that trace was important to look what it's done Scott Appears around Switchback like that. She's not a bloody railway layout. Is he like this? looks like a classic railroad layout, Not bloody. PCB Order out anyway.

Claire What we'll do is we'll just under out all and study in. Ok, so what I'm going to do now is do that exact one again, but not wrap the ground in here. Now the team should make this easier. Maybe they haven't been as using 17 for a while, so maybe there's a simpler way.

but that's basically we need to go into classes here and we need to set up different knit classes. So what I've done is I've got all night before. Like all by default, every nick goes to own it and that's what we're routing before. But now I've set up all but ground so I put in air re nothing there except ground.

So I've removed the ground from the air and ground just sits in its own net. So now we can Actually, instead of routing the entire board, we can route just of that class. Alright so here we go, order out and instead of all on an individual net will route a net class and we can select all but ground. There it is.

so select all background and away she goes and you notice it. Remember before it actually did the ground one First, it hasn't actually routed the ground. so now it's doing the power. Who went out.

5 volt power can be done this in a multi-layer board. We don't have our power planes and stuff like that. so this is. You know it might get to a hundred percent our completion now that we've actually taken out the grounds from this, because we're feeling those what later with polygons poor and you know, tied it up.

So let's see what it does with just the main Etienne de Vc, which I think is that you know. So this is quite a rear realistic sort of scenario. If you ask me to order out this board I had to do it in the next hour, this would probably be how I do it. So I'll come back and we'll check out the end result.

Now I'm not sure why it keeps popping up with this. such a rather unusual as anyone knows. have encountered that before. Then again, I don't do much.

Order ready and begin What's going on here. It's like hmm alright. this is getting ridiculous. Isn't getting unusable? It's almost as if it's popping up after each net is routed.

That's just nuts that help. No, it's just not incrementing at all. Now it's still stuck on that net. a hundred and seventy of 238 and it just keeps popping up.

It's like what I Don't get it. Am I doing something stupid or is this thing just not working? Not. I have to give up on this. It is not progressing beyond a hundred seventy of 238 connections.

It seems to just be spinning its wheels on the exact same problem there. So I I'm gonna have to call that I'm gonna have to call it quits. That's just not surrounding. Finished with 11 contentions filed to complete 68 connections.

Will know she'd show up what didn't work at all. Yet as far as I know that is the way that you would do it to you know I said to do everything but ground you just order wrappin it class and it should just do everything I mean it was cock. come around that give me a break like I not if it's crap. what ya anyway like like this and probably some reasonable route America had look at them you know half of them might be and I really like this one here is quite reasonable what you do yourself kind of thing.

but like now I don't like that's a file. Ridiculous. Alright let's just try another order around in technique are called selective our order routing where let's just select two components like this right? and this would be quite uh you know, common for a professional layout person to do this in a bit more detail sitting with more strict rules and everything. but let's give it a go.

Ok now what we got we can. we can have just order out the connections on the selected components, all the connections between the selected components. So let's just do something between the selected components first once again using all the same rules that we've already been that using. So let's give that a go so it'll only route order out those there you go.

and of course it didn't It didn't touch the United well it did the ground between the pads there. So once again that we had to we probably have to fill up the night classes and also that other things that didn't let us exclude a class from just these two which is kind of you know, annoying. So we wanted to do that. Ideally want to do that with a restriction on classes.

But anyway, so with individually routed that so let's actually undo that. Understand up No, you know how reasonable job they're right for those are few connections unwrapped all and let's try that again. Actually let's select those but let's order out on selected components so it should also do the connections between this other chip over here as well and it'll do the clock lines between those two chips. Hopefully you should connect on selected components so let's try that.

There we go. It started to do this side Youtube chip here so we can just have it select those things so there's no reason why you can't go in there first and do like all of your clock line. For example, put your clock line in there. put your ground.

like a nice stuff like power supply. You wouldn't order out a power supply just you know. put those traces in yourself. Taken listen, Minimum of pride in your work there.

and of course you exclude the ground and then just you know. like auto route. Just the logic connections. This is a classic.

Why it's important. Like if you've got a really dense, huge, bored with lots of digital logic that's not particularly high speed is not high speed. design rules and differential pairs and all the fancy pantsy stuff right then you know often just let it rip. For example, just let the file rip on.

You know a particular are bored if the signal integrity wasn't critical between two chips and things like that. yeah, just have at it. But the problem with doing that selectively routing like this without having to have done, you know I pre out. Certain things like that is it.

It's going to bloody and I lock you in going to block you in that much further down the track when you start doing that. More routes and things like that so that you know that's why a good PCB layout person is worth their weight in gold because I'll be able to think you know halfway across the board ahead and you know a thousand route ahead and go. I need to leave space for that and you know you're going to stick around. Shit that rules.

it's just all kept in your head and things like that as you still sore on my previous video. But of course it does take in more time to order out sorry to manually route a board of course because I often get a much better job, but you know all I rounds can be useful in selective scenarios and just getting something. As I said, if you need that needed, have something out the door. Yeah, it's three o'clock and you need to send out that file by four o'clock then you're not going to be manually round the thing I You just want to get something sending out, then you know you can order around it and at least you have something you know to build up your mock-up a prototype with and hopefully get this thing working.

But yeah, they're not terrific. But Out Him is not the best auto router arm algorithm out there. not by fire. in fact, some people consider at the worst or one of the worst order routing engines out there.

So yea, or you order routing fanboys and flame away. That all equals better. or this is better. that's better.

And of course you know you have to do exact side-by-side comparison that have to lay this out to do a real shootout between algorithms that have to be laid out precisely on exactly the same grid components, all exactly the same footprints, everything with the exact same Mets and lay out the exact same rules that everything else to. You know it, it's got to be apples. A hundred percent apples to apples. or it's just not worth comparing border routers really.

So basically they have it side-by-side and order routed board fully auto routerboard on the top there including all the grounds and the power and my manually routed the board down the bottom here and well it's not terrific of course are you know there's lots of hard things in there is lots of stuff you're gonna tidy up and is a six missing nets which you couldn't do which were absolutely trivial which is should have been able to handle but you know you tweak the algorithms and I ue maybe include some selective order around. You probably can eventually massage it into doing a reasonable job like an hour half competent our manual around down the bottom here we would take a look at the bottom side here. you can see how you know I Manual routing I Did very few on the bottom I really tried to optimize everything on the one layer. where is the manual, the order outages we know you've been given two layers.

let me at it even. I did try to prioritize the horizontal ones on the bottom layer, the vertical ones on the top. It didn't do nearly as thorough job as I did that manually here. so that's why you end up with all the crap on the bottom and then if you tried to you know I feel the tidy this up with the ground plane going there and select your I the ground for example and then I you know get rid of all that.

and yeah, we're going around the grounds on these other chips so you know that's just not so. if you underground feel that didn't nothing, there's no space left to do it. Yeah, they're jumpers everywhere on your new ground so it's the stock. Terrific autorads like right? They are very very powerful tools used in the right hands under the right set up conditions.

But you know the myth of just being out around your entire border with its ridiculously simple you know and it's just going to produce a horrible results. So they go I Hope you like that little quick look at the LG Amor around a technology and honor Yeah is fairly average double sided board of and sort of smallish are complexity with the few little tricky across routing stuff that had to deal with and yeah it didn't do a great job at all. Anyway, you like the video, please give it a big thumbs up. catch you next time and go on for you order reading fanboys have added down below.