> Pity though, since Eagle routed my board perfectly with two layers. So,
> Eagle couldn't figure out a way to produce a single sided board with all
> the nets routed. Not a problem, I spent many an hour manually rerouting
> stuff. My question is this: How do you deal with jumper wires? I dropped
> spare pads down and routed to the pad, skipped a section, then dropped
> another pad and routed from there.

For single sided boards...

If you get ALMOST get there with the autorouter, let it route your bottom,
and then turn back on the top layer and autoroute again.  Then use jumper
wires wherever eagle put a trace on the top.  You may have to do some
rearrangement to get your jumpers to be straight.  If you want straight
jumpers.

For manual routing, I start on the bottom, route to a "conveniet" location
not near to many other traces, then use the middle mouse button to switch
layers.  This creates a via, and then I route my "jumper" on the top layer
until I'm close to the destination, use the middle button again to get back
to the bottom, and finish.  The jumper goes between the vias (make sure your
via drill/pad size is set appropriately!)

There's a big problem with amateur boards, in that your holes aren't plated
through, and you therefore can't count on any connection that goes THROUGH
the board at a component hole unless you can solder that lead on both sides
of the board.  (For some components, this is impossible - you can use
rectangles in tRestrict layer to prevent Eagle from routing to topside pads,
if you want.)  This means that for small number of topside tracks, you'd
rather have (added) vias (where you can solder a wire on both sides) than
connections that go top-to-bottom via a pad.

There is either a ULP or a routing ".ctl" file that's supposed to optimize
things for single-sided boards with jumpers.  I tried it a couple of times,
and it seemed to work pretty well.  (In general, though, I'm not impressed
with Eagle's ability to route single-sided boards, and end up doing mostly
manual routing.)

BillW

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics
(like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics