Data Sheet

LABCENTER ELECTRONICS LTD.

144

Start by invoking the autorouter dialogue form (Tools Menu), switching to Interactive mode and

then selecting the Begin Routing button.

Entering the router interactively

A command window will open at the bottom of the Editing Window, which will allow us to direct

the routing progress interactively. The PCB Layout provides a rich command set to control

routing, including such things as bend radius for mitering tracks and fanout length and direction

from SMT pads. This is fully documented in the reference manual so we will concentrate on

some basic practical examples in this tutorial.

There are a couple of important points worth emphasizing at this stage:

Any commands entered will action on a set of tagged connections or on the whole board if

nothing is highlighted.

Changing the circuit or switching modes will automatically exit the routing interface.

Essentially, what this means is that we can dictate what connections are routed by controlling

which items are highlighted.

First of all let’s clean up the loose tracking on bottom copper resulting from our previous rip of

the top copper tracks. The basic syntax of most commands is:

so we can start by typing clean 2 to clean up the superfluous tracking.