topic Re: URGENT! Dead in the water, Eagle crashes, dumps errors and airwires all over in EAGLE Forum

URGENT! Dead in the water, Eagle crashes, dumps errors and airwires all over.

jesper8W75R — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 15:41:46 GMT

I opened a board, I made a few months ago, with 9.5.0, opening with 9.5.2 (on OSX), never been a problem with other boards.
Added a few testpoints in the schematic and tried to route them in the layout.
But then Eagle give me an error message, saying Unexpected Condition details: File ../../src/obstrutils.cpp, Line 604
And keeps on with that for a while, then sometimes crashes.

Tried update to 9.6.0, same issue. Thought perhaps my Catalina upgrade was the problem, but no, same on an older machine. Image: "routing_errors"

I then looked more closely at the board and there was airwires all over. Some very small, within a pad, some was very strange and made no sense. Image: "airwires_all_over"
The airwire in image "airwires_B" makes no sense. In the lower part of the pic, I had moved the "KB_ROW_6" net down a bit and got a completely new airwire out of nowhere.

How can this happen?

This board design was 100% ok, It has previously been sent it to a board manufacturer, NO DRC Errors.

This is VERY urgent, I was going to update and send the design to a customer, but are now stuck.

Sorry for the crappy images, but this forum only allows 3 attachments, so I had to stick things together.

Re: URGENT! Dead in the water, Eagle crashes, dumps errors and airwires all over

mtl_asm — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 17:39:19 GMT

Did you try to go back and use Eagle 9.5 instead? Do the design files work properly in the older version of eagle still? (if it is urgent this may be an OK temporary solution at least?)

You can get the older versions here if you don't still have it.

http://eagle.autodesk.com/eagle/software-versions

Re: URGENT! Dead in the water, Eagle crashes, dumps errors and airwires all over

jesper8W75R — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 18:11:36 GMT

Nope, already tried, 9.5.0, 9.5.2, 9.6.0.
Nothing works.
I even ripped up ALL traces and tried to route.
Got the error anyway.

Something is seriously wrong with EAGLE (at least with that file).
I'm apparently not the only one getting this error, it's been known by the EAGLE team for over 5 months, but still appears.
That is pretty sad.

If this is not fixed, it's >100 hours lost.

Re: URGENT! Dead in the water, Eagle crashes, dumps errors and airwires all over

mtl_asm — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 18:31:10 GMT

Did you try something like

File->save copy for eagle 7.x

Then open that copy for old eagle into 9.5 or whatever version you did not have the issue with?

Re: URGENT! Dead in the water, Eagle crashes, dumps errors and airwires all over

jesper8W75R — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 05:13:30 GMT

Thank you for that hint!
I didn't even know about that export feature.
I tried, but board still would not work in 9.5.X or 9.6.0
BUT, I still have all my old EAGLE versions, so I could open the board in EAGLE 7.7 and make my changes.
So far, so good, I'm out of the worst misery.

However, the initial problem persists. And although the board is not 100% routed and fine in EAGLE 7.7, it still causes errors in 9.6.0, if I try re-routing a wire.
When fixing all the micro airwires (>1400 !!!), I noted that only traces to components were bugged, no layer-to-layer with vias had become corrupted.
So, my theory is that I actually worked on that board with EAGLE 9.3.x or 9.4.x, which was all fine, then created Gerbers e.t.c.
Later, I opened the board in 9.5.0, because I needed to add some comments to the schematic.
When saving with version 9.5.0, some rounding error caused all components to shift VERY little.
I checked the CPU, which should have been positioned at 38, 51, but is now at 38.000253125, 51.000809375
I looked at other components and the shift in position is not consistent. Some moved left, some right, some up/down or other combinations. All roughly the same distance, about 0.002 - 0.009mm
It seems this is a bug in EAGLE 9.5.0 (or perhaps one of the late 4.X versions).

Re: URGENT! Dead in the water, Eagle crashes, dumps errors and airwires all over

mtl_asm — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 16:51:52 GMT

ok well at least you can get the work done for now 🙂 ...

in terms of getting the file working correctly in 9.x though, are most of your parts on points in the "grid"? if they were you could try move ctrl click them and it shoudl force the aprt to snap to the grid. So if your grid was 1 mm for example, then your cpu would snap to the closest mm for position, which may solve that. Ctrl alt will do the same but snap to the minor grid. If that solves it and removes the air wires for the part you could make a very simple ULP that just runs through the parts on the board and rounds the position of the parts to some desired precision.

I had a similar problem to this importing and exporting eagle designs to another program. sometimes importing them back 3.000000 becomes 2.999999998 or something like that.

Re: URGENT! Dead in the water, Eagle crashes, dumps errors and airwires all over

matt.berggren — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 17:08:44 GMT

Thanks for helping this user! Also for everyone’s benefit, there is an Align to Grid option in the Align command. So you can select a group of parts and then align->align to grid. We will unpack the issue more and find the best way to prevent this from happening but hopefully that helps in the meantime!

Best regards,
Matt

Re: URGENT! Dead in the water, Eagle crashes, dumps errors and airwires all over

jesper8W75R — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 17:33:30 GMT

I normally align all my parts on a 1mm grid, in some cases 0.5 and occasionally 0.1.
However, all parts had been shifted, as mentioned earlier.
I had already tried to snap back the parts, but it did not help, the traces had also been moved a couple of thousands of a mm in random directions.
Even a board totally ripped up with NO traces at all, cause the error if I try route any signal.
I had tried the ULP snap-board, but that moves everything, so I made my own, snapping only components.
Didn't work, of course, as traces also were wrong.

Matt, your align command doesn't fix it, as it's the same as snapping to the grid.
This is way deeper in EAGLE.

I did get a great tip from support - route in "Ignore obstacles" mode. Then I don't get the error.
Actually, I might use that mode in the future, as it reminds me of how the good old EAGLE worked.

Re: URGENT! Dead in the water, Eagle crashes, dumps errors and airwires all over

mtl_asm — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 17:48:49 GMT

maybe an alternate approach to removing the "airwires allover" style problem on the photos you posts is to run the autorouter? while this won't re position the traces, it should fill in all the small air wires caused by the minor displacements?

Also i just wondered out of curiosity, if you open the board as a text file to see the XML code. Is the x/y pos of the CPU rounded to a mm or is it in the xml file as the mm + some small perturbation?

gl.

Re: URGENT! Dead in the water, Eagle crashes, dumps errors and airwires all over

jorge_garcia — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 22:22:06 GMT

Hi @jesper8W75R ,

The issue in your particular file was actually in your dimension lines. I figure you imported the file from another program via DXF?

Let me know if you continue to run into problems.

Best Regards,

Re: URGENT! Dead in the water, Eagle crashes, dumps errors and airwires all over

jesper8W75R — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 02:29:18 GMT

Ahh, weird.
No, the file was made entirely in EAGLE.
As the board contains two sloped parts, +11 deg and -11 deg, these were made first one by one, by rotating the entire layout. First +11 deg, place components, route as much as possible, then back and to the -11 degree part.
Finally, the non-rotated part were done, and tracks to the rotated parts were made.
I might have rotated the whole shabang one way or the other after layout were done. Perhaps that's where the CPU (which is on the non-rotated part) shifted from 38, 51 to 38.000253125, 51.000809375.
Reason being that it's not possible to rotate over a defined point, so when I rotate back to "normal", I had to move the board into position, using helper lines. That could have been where the locations got a bit off.

Still, component pads and traces should still (and did then) stick together.

So, it could still be a rounding issue, that occur(red) when rotating boards. Component pads and traces might not end up at the position as they should, causing an airwire.
And seemingly also did something with the dimension lines, which weirdly enough affected the routing and gave the dreaded Line 604 assert.

The thing is that AFTER all this rotation, routing and fun, I had a 100% routed board, which had no airwires from which I made Gerbers and prototypes.

At some point and seemingly with EAGLE 9.5.0, something happened and messed up the locations.
Perhaps after a rotate.

Plenty of exciting stuff for you do dig into 😉

Thank you for all the help, the "Ignore obstacles" mode, and the export to EAGLE 7.7 and route there was good workarounds.