Experienced cad men rarely use autorouters. They don't take into account star grounding or areas of high sensitivity to interference.
I must admit I do use my autorouter but the go in and spend time fixing the mess it has done. The autorouter is handy for doing short traces and so I usually leave those. I pull out all the grounds and wire them separately to a single point at the pcb edge connector for power. I make sure any audio inputs are as short as possible. I then add copper pours attached to ground around sensitive audio signals.
My software has two good points, you can optimise nets and it can also do a swap-autoplace on components to give you shortest nets.
As a Windows 10 user since it came out I would bin XP pronto and move on to Win 10. You can get Win 10 keys for less than a fiver on ebay so no excuses about cost. Win 10 downloads are available to a flash drive for installation.
I must admit I do use my autorouter but the go in and spend time fixing the mess it has done. The autorouter is handy for doing short traces and so I usually leave those. I pull out all the grounds and wire them separately to a single point at the pcb edge connector for power. I make sure any audio inputs are as short as possible. I then add copper pours attached to ground around sensitive audio signals.
My software has two good points, you can optimise nets and it can also do a swap-autoplace on components to give you shortest nets.
As a Windows 10 user since it came out I would bin XP pronto and move on to Win 10. You can get Win 10 keys for less than a fiver on ebay so no excuses about cost. Win 10 downloads are available to a flash drive for installation.
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KiCad hasn't supported auto-routing directly for many years as the result of litigation by a number of makers of cad software. In recent versions you can use a related external web based tool that you can access from KiCad Pcbnew.
I use KiCad for all of my personal projects and for analog stuff at least I would never consider auto-routing.
I use KiCad for all of my personal projects and for analog stuff at least I would never consider auto-routing.
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