Last night, I spent about an hour and a half on the board layout. I got down to 6 unconnected nets and wasn’t seeing an easy way to get them routed, so I figured I’d fire up the auto router and see what it did.

Sadly, I have Java all disabled on my computer because of the latest security scare, so that didn’t work. I realized it was late and I could just look at it tomorrow, so I closed Pcbnew. Right after I did that, I thought “Did I save that?” So I opened it again to find out that I had not. None of my work was saved. An hour and a half down the drain.

Clearly my fault for never saving. I should certainly know better. I’m surprised KiCad didn’t pop up a warning. Maybe the export to the autorouter format got counted as a save, so it thought it had been saved.

I did take that file and use the auto router on a different PC, but then KiCad wouldn’t import it back, so even that was no savior.

So, back to working on it again tonight. I do at least remember some of the pitfalls I ran into, so my initial board layout is a little better I think. Now on to the actual routing…