Autorouter Experiment
So this board was kind of a joke experiment. I designed an AC coupled audio mixer with a lot of ins and outs in a very tight space. The physical layout took a very long time to get right, and once complete, I was very tired. So, I did something I haven't done in many years. I pulled up the Auto-Router tool, and let it take a crack at the board. Now wait! I realize you're all groaning, and moving on, but as I said, it's just an experiment, to see what I would get. I didn't even bother to change the trace width. There where really odd things about some ground pins, and holes that (in my opinion) where too close to board edge, etc. But I ran DRC, cleaned up what I could quickly see as "wrong", and submitted it anyway. Just a 5 piece run to see what they would say. Well, They didn't say anything! It was approved and went to manufacturing within 10 minutes!?!? I received the boards yesterday, populated 3 of them, and you know what? THEY WORK! Hahahha. So, experiment is successful. I won't do this again, as I really hate some of the way Autorouter treated the signal path, BUT PCBWay took a weirdly constructed board, and made it happen with no issues at all. Very impressed. In fact, I'm about to go research just how close to board edge they're actually willing to get. I really would like to move it just half a millimeter closer to the edge. ;P
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