TraceMaker

TraceMaker is a C++20 autorouter and component placer for KiCad 9 and 10 boards. You give it a .kicad_pcb file and it writes tracks and vias back into the file, touching nothing it did not create, so the rest of the file round-trips unchanged. Results are judged by KiCad's own design-rule check (kicad-cli pcb drc), not by the router's own scoring.

It runs on Linux, with a contributed macOS build with a Metal backend and Windows use via WSL2. A CUDA GPU speeds it up but is not required. Tagged releases carry a Linux binary, a live viewer, an example board, agent skills, and a KiCad 10 plugin installable through the Plugin and Content Manager.

The README publishes benchmark results on PCBench boards and states limits plainly: it uses more vias than Freerouting, dense BGA and fine-pitch QFN boards are harder (41% clean on dense packages), and delay tuning can be undone by a later stage, citing an open issue on a USB skew case.

User quanln reported that the --halving flag silently ignored --relax, with the output board byte-identical with and without it, and gave a deterministic reproduction on release 0.12.1.

Source, 2026-10-30