evandude
New Member
I'd suggest you eas yourself over to eagle... I know it can certainly be "head-breaking" when you get started, those crazy germans sure didn't make the interface nearly as intuitive as it should have been, but once you get used to it it's really not hard at all...
generally when I need jumper wires I just design the board as a 2-layer board... anywhere I wish to have a jumper, I go up to the top layer, over the traces I need to cross, and then back down... then I etch the board as a single-layer board (bottom layer only) and simply put jumpers in place of each of the top-layer tracks.
For using the autorouter, I generally do a bunch by hand, then maybe let the autorouter run and see what it comes up with, and then I edit the autorouted tracks manually until they look like what I want... shortening them, rerouting, and adding jumpers as needed. But on a lot of my boards I don't use the autorouter at all... generally unless it's something with a lot of buses (like in a digital logic or microcontroller circuit where you might have an 8-bit bus running between a few chips), there isn't too much need for an autorouter.
But I promised myself to always allow myself a few jumpers when I had spent several hours trying to get a certain board optimized to a single side with no jumpers, when I realized that it would take me 2 minutes to solder in a jumper or two, thereby saving myself a lot of time tearing my hair out on the design instead.
generally when I need jumper wires I just design the board as a 2-layer board... anywhere I wish to have a jumper, I go up to the top layer, over the traces I need to cross, and then back down... then I etch the board as a single-layer board (bottom layer only) and simply put jumpers in place of each of the top-layer tracks.
For using the autorouter, I generally do a bunch by hand, then maybe let the autorouter run and see what it comes up with, and then I edit the autorouted tracks manually until they look like what I want... shortening them, rerouting, and adding jumpers as needed. But on a lot of my boards I don't use the autorouter at all... generally unless it's something with a lot of buses (like in a digital logic or microcontroller circuit where you might have an 8-bit bus running between a few chips), there isn't too much need for an autorouter.
But I promised myself to always allow myself a few jumpers when I had spent several hours trying to get a certain board optimized to a single side with no jumpers, when I realized that it would take me 2 minutes to solder in a jumper or two, thereby saving myself a lot of time tearing my hair out on the design instead.