Ultiboard Autorouter Bug?

[skeatz]

I have been trying out the Ultiboard Autorouter feature, using the circuit in the Getting Started Guide. I noticed that the tracks produced by Ultiboard's autorouter have many small 'jagged' segments (circled in magenta with arrow pointing to it).

Is there anyway that I can get the autorouter to route tracks cleanly, without these jaggies?

thanks,
skeatz

[GrahamG]

Hi,

I've been trying to reproduce your problem. When I auto-route the same circut I dont get any jagged edges. Can I ask which version of Ultiboard you are using?

As a quick fix I would just use the click and drag from the mouse to straighten them up manually then add teardrops to the connections to strengthen the contacts.

If you can give me some more info about what you did and what software you have I will try again to get your results.

best regards

[skeatz]

Hi Graham,

I'm using NI Circuit Design Suite 10.0 Educational. Ultiboard reports itself as Ultiboard Education Edition ver 10.0.343. I opened the sample circuit from Getting Started (filename: GettingStarted.ewprj), selected the board after placement (GS3 tab) and asked it to autoroute. Everything was done using the default settings. The jaggies appear everytime I autoroute.

I am kind of concerned as my institution intends to purchase a large number of licences (> 500 copies) of NI Circuit Design Suite for use in our courses. The lack of an autoplace feature in the Educational Suite is already a issue for some of my staff (the NI distributor here told us that it is available in the Education Edition - now it appears that autoplacement/push & shove placement is only found in the Professional version).

I really don't need my staff to discover more faults with the software - I have a hard enough time convincing them to convert to NI Circuit Design Suite as it is.

thanks for your assistance.

Skeatz

[kittmaster]

this is a problem that has existed since version 7, it adds all kinds of unneeded routing segments. This is supposed to be address in the next version

[lacy]

Cool. This answers a question I was getting ready to ask. Thanks Chris. As you know I did a project recently and this happened to me too. I had to go through it trace by trace and straighten them out especially around the pad/hole areas.

Thanks a bunch. Nice information to know.

[GrahamG]

Hi

I think this may indeed be a glitch in the program. I know that in the power pro edition the feature corner mitering is available under the design menu which would automatically solve this problem. I dont think this is available in the educational edition as this is only a limited version of the software. I have forwarded on you comments and this should be resolved in subsequent releases of Ultiboard.

I hope that this doesnt prove to be too much of a problem for you in the future

best regards

[kittmaster]

it could also be a setting that i found that is corrupted of "don't no use pin corners" and guess what.....all my designs the trace enters in as pin corners, no matter if selected as yes or no

This bug was reported months back, hopefully it makes it to the next edition fix.

[skeatz]

Thanks for all the info; I guess I will just have to live with it for the time being, until the next release comes up (hopefully, this will be fixed with the next release - Graham, any chance of asking the s/w development team to look into it?)

BTW, I've tried changing the 'Minimum Trace Length' settings in the Design Rules - doesn't seem to have any effect on the jaggies.

rgds,
skeatz

[lacy]

Hi Graham,

I have the Power Pro Version with the corner mitre feature and unless I am not doing something correctly then that doesn't sole the jaggy trace problem. I am going to post the Ultiboard file. This file is one of the samples that I used the autoplace and autorouter on.

In the picture you can clearly see tha the jagged traces are still there after the mitre funtion was completed. I used all default settings with none of the extra options checked. I will let you examine file as well as the JPG and maybe you can tell whether or not that this option is not working for this problem or if maybe I haven't set this up correctly in order for it to work.

[Kerms]

Hello, I also noticed this problem with some of the layouts I was testing. Could you please tell me what miter settings you used to clean up the routing errors?

I am trying to evaluate Ultiboard for my design needs. I am coming from Proteus ARES and I am using it with ConnectEDA's ELECTRA autorouter. ELECTRA works really great for my board needs but I am fighting bugs left and right on Proteus in general and am looking to move to the NI design suite. My concern is how well the autorouter on Ultiboard works. Obviously this bug would introduce a lot of additional work and may cause routable boards to fail if its not able to have an efficient path.

Should I be looking at a different layout system if this is my concern?