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Step 7: Remove ground-planes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Step 8: Painted areas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Step 9: Clean the tracks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Step 10: Reverse and burn out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Step 11: Smooth the edges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Step 12: AutoTrace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Step 13: Component side . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Step 14: Fill in the substrate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Step 15: Isolate the components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Step 16: Combine the sides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Step 17: Add component symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Step 18: Finally, rearrange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Related Instructables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Image Notes 1. Photo of the component side of the board I used for this project 2. I only needed a schematic for part of the board, so just traced this much of the component side
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Image Notes 1. This is sufficiently pulled out and rearranged to be useful! The red lines connect to traces on the board I haven't mapped out, since I only did a quarter of this board.
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Image Notes 1. This part of the board didn't get enough light, making it harder to obtain a clear image of all the tracks 2. This part of the board got a bit too much light, making it harder to get a clear image of the tracks 3. These tracks suffered a fair amount of aberrations, both chromatic and due to refracted light through the solder resist. 4. Painted areas come with their own problems
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Create a new layer, and make sure it is active. This will contain your alignment marks. Being on a separate layer, they will be easier to copy to the other layers. Put borders at the corners of the board to make it easier to align the images later. To do this, make a square selection at each corner, then make another square selection the same size but shifted inwards a bit, using subtract mode. Fill the selection using the bucket fill tool. I didn't do this and found alignment without corners to be tricky. You could use any alignment marks you like of course, corners is just what I thought of.
Image Notes 1. Datasheets. I used the word "candidate" as the component identification is not 100% positive. 2. Various images I tried 3. The stuff I'm actually using goes in here 4. Hello, instructables!
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Image Notes 1. With the green and blue channels turned off, the copper pads stand out against a dark background 2. Very good result in the best lit part of the picture 3. A bit of manual cleaning needed here
Image Notes 1. The layer showing just the holes. Too many to paint in by hand here, but using the colour difference to pick them out worked well. A minimum of cleaning up by hand was needed.
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Image Notes 1. Detail view of holes overlayed onto photograph 2. I also included test points in with my holes
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Image Notes 1. The brush creates nice, even, easy to place little circles 2. A group of holes enclosed by a stroked rectangle selection. 3. Some holes were placed so that the circle would overlap the tracks, so I created a free selection around them. As it worked out, I needn't have done this,
Image Notes 1. It may have been easier to put in these circles before deleting the ground planes, then I could have deleted the actual holes at the same time.
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Image Notes 1. X shaped brush. Note it does not reach the corners of the canvas, as the arms are the same length as the plus sign.
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Image Notes 1. Remaining areas of substrate 2. The ground planes covered most of the board. The remaining dots are the holes, which I left as I removed the planes before circling the holes before deciding the order of steps should be as shown in this instructable.
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
You may find it easiest to make the selections for these areas by using the manual selection tools rather than the fuzzy select. I found it easiest to select the whole area, then isolate the bits I wanted to keep by de-selecting them. Always ensure the layer you are working on is selected, not whatever layer you are using to see the detail, otherwise your hard work will be lost.
Image Notes 1. Although you can see the tracks, it's not always clear which bits are track and which bits are substrate.
Image Notes 1. Burn mode 2. Tracks much more clear now. You can make the green parts visible again by deleting the areas above and below the paint on this layer.
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Image Notes 1. The tracks are clear now, but it is now also clear that there is a lot of roughness and aberration to clean up.
Image Notes 1. Set guides and the brush will cling to them.
Image Notes 1. You can see the range of bad lighting here.
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Image Notes 1. Setting the black and white levels using the traces will create a nicely contrasty image. 2. Use the colour pickers to set the black and white levels. The "Auto" will set the lightest area to white and the darkest to black.
Image Notes 1. Notice how jagged the edges are. This will cause spurious traces from AutoTrace and needs to be corrected 2. Use the colour pickers to set the black and white levels
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Image Notes 1. Notice how the edges are nice and smooth now. This won't cause problems for AutoTrace!
Image Notes 1. Bezier lines containing editable points 2. Edit tool 3. Bezier drawing tool 4. Join nodes together tool 5. A tracing error. You can correct this by breaking apart and joining together correctly the associated nodes. 6. Selection tool
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Image Notes 1. Photo of the component side of the board I used for this project 2. I only needed a schematic for part of the board, so just traced this much of the component side
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Image Notes 1. The hard part was working out which bits were substrate and which bits were just shadow, and what was under the painted legends.
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Image Notes 1. Composite image showing holes taken from solder side, filled in substrate covering painted legends, and tracks on component side
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Image Notes 1. Drag a line onto a connection point and the symbol will turn red to show it is connected. If you drag onto a centre connection point, it will turn yellow. 2. All components which are connected to a ground plane have their symbols connected to a ground plane
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Image Notes 1. The jumble of lines is starting to look like a circuit diagram now Image Notes 1. Click a polyline, and you can see a a trail of points. Find the ones at the ends and attach a zigzag line to the attachment points on the component symbols. You can then delete the polyline. Use multiple zigzag lines if there are multiple attachments. 2. I used lamp symbols to denote holes through the board which are connected to a hidden layer - the "free" holes on the back of the board.
Image Notes 1. As the polylines are replaced by zigzag lines, the diagram can be rearranged into a neat schematic
Image Notes 1. Dia support "rubber band" selection. Carefully select a group of components and you can move them around as a block. The lines connecting in will move appropriately.
Image Notes 1. This is sufficiently pulled out and rearranged to be useful! The red lines connect to traces on the board I haven't mapped out, since I only did a quarter of this board.
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
Related Instructables
Find schematics, wiring diagrams, etc. for everyday electronic devices (video) by siliconghost
Hack The Spy Ear and Learn to Reverse Engineer a Circuit by Biotele
Comments
47 comments Add Comment
cyphunk says:
excellent!
Donotmatthews says:
anyway to identify these components? http://www.trafficlights.com/images/T3_photos.jpg I want to try and build one.
throbscottle says:
Feb 23, 2011. 4:36 AM REPLY The various components will be marked with their values and part numbers. Looking at the photo, at top left you have a potentiometer, which will be marked with it's value probably in kilo-ohms - you will have to look for a figure ending in K, or possibly A or B (one of these means logarithmic, one means linear, but I can't remember which is which - this one will be linear), next to it you have a standard looking red LED and what is probably it's current limiting resistor, then the two blue cylinders are electrolytic capacitors, which will be marked with their value in microfarads (uF) and voltage, just in front of them is what looks like a glass bodied diode (possibly a zener), then going right again is probably a rectifier diode. The big stripey thing next to that is a resistor, probably 1 or 2 watt. The big black box is a fuse holder. Just in front of that you have 3 devices which looking at the wiring diagram on the web-site tell me are triacs - you will have to look at their markings to find out the exact type - you can look these up on the internet and 99% of the time be able to find some data - next to those are 3 resistors which look like they feed the control signal to the triacs. The 8 legged animal is some sort of chip - again you will have to look at the markings to find out what it is, though again looking at the web site, it is probably a micro-controller, and above that is another resistor. Next to that you have a dual dip switch. Without knowing more about the circuit, I can't really tell you more. The resistor colour code, in case you don't know it, is Black = 0, Brown = 1, Red = 2, Orange = 3, Yellow = 4, Green = 5, Blue = 6, Purple = 7, Grey = 8, White = 9. First two bands are the base value, 3rd band is the multiplier (ie, number of noughts) so brown, grey, red woudl be 1800 ohms, or 1.8K, brown, grey, black would be 18 ohms, brown, grey, blue would be 1800,000 ohms, or 1.8M. The fourth band is tolerance, used to be gold or silver for 5% or 10%, but now red or brown for 2% or 1% is common. There may be also a band to indicate temperature coeffecient. Gold and silver are sometimes also used for the 3rd band to indicate divide by 10 or 100. At first I thought you had one of these and wanted to clone it, but it looks like you just want to build your own version from the photo of the one they are selling! Cheeky :-) Unless you can program your own microcontroller, your best bet is to find a free circuit diagram to build one yourself, or better yet, design your own, rather than try to copy a proprietary design from a photo. I'm sorry to say there just isn't enough information in a photo like this to be able to work out any more than the basic power control - it has the triacs connected to the lamp outputs, these are fed by what look to be high value (and possibly special purpose) resistors from the microcontroller. It looks like there is a very basic live power supply to give the low voltage DC. There may of course be SMD's underneath the board, which of course you can't see, though it looks unlikely. I hope this is helpful to you - wish I could give you more useful information.
siliconghost says:
Great Instructable. You might want to also mention this: http://www.instructables.com/id/Find-schematics-wiring-diagrams-etc-for-everyda/
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
throbscottle says:
Wow - cool! I will look to see if there is a UK equivalent!
siliconghost says:
No problem! Please let me know if you find a UK equivalent. FYI, I just added a reference to your Instructable from my video page as well. - John
iffee says:
I have an AVR similar to the picture attached. The components and PCB have been potted with some compound. How this compound can be desolved.?
Euphy says:
Feb 8, 2011. 11:56 PM REPLY Epoxy potting compound is pretty hard to remove. I've only ever managed to remove it from things I didn't want to keep (ie hit it with a hammer), and even then it was untidy. However: http://www.instructables.com/answers/Dissolving-Epoxy/ http://kevtris.org/Projects/votraxpss/unpot.html And there are a couple of other pages on the internet about various attempts.
tomkawal says:
Some advices for taking a picture sound like overengineering of reverseengineereing. At good light no need for tripod. Guys, to take a photo of PCB, any regular printer scanner seems to do the job. I use polarising filter to contrast the text on IC. Also good to have microscope, backlight for details of PCB etc. cheers
demyhr says:
Jan 20, 2011. 6:59 PM REPLY As a retired "professional" doing design and layout of complex multi-layer (30 +) PCB's I must say there are limits to what can be done reverse engineering these boards. It is impossible to see inner traces of boards with internal power and ground planes even with x-ray techniques. I suppose one could probe with an ohmmeter but with many of the boards I have designed this would take a lifetime. On the other hand I have used GIMP in conjunction with a flat-bed scanner quite successfully for measurement purposes. Scanning at 1200 dpi gives an accuracy slightly better than 0.001" and using the measurement function of GIMP dimensions can be determined quite accurately. All in all a good instruct-able given a few caveats.
throbscottle says:
Feb 3, 2011. 3:57 AM REPLY It seems that the more I discover, the more complex this becomes! However, even an incomplete schematic is better than none at all, and this is a relatively un-complicated digital TV decoder. I will try the scanner method at some point. Feb 1, 2011. 1:02 PM REPLY
aetienne3493 says:
what are artefacts and how would you get rid of them with the clone and blur tools? here's what i have so far
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
throbscottle says:
Oh, apparently I also meant physical bits of dirt, hairs etc as well as optical aberrations.
throbscottle says:
Feb 2, 2011. 5:53 AM REPLY Artefacts are things which don't really exist, like optical aberrations - like if the light has made a shiny spot, or something has got blurred and looks like it is a slightly different shape, or you have coloured edges to the tracks - tricks of the light and shadow, things like that. You can use the clone tool by finding a spot that looks the same as the place you want to correct, ctrl-click (I think, you will have to check) that spot, then paint over the place you want to correct. It will copy the first spot over the second. Use blur for if you have a small detail you want to remove. Just paint over the spot until you have blurred it enough. Looking at your picture, I would seriously consider hand tracing it and missing out most of the graphical techniques, since it's a fairly simple board. Also, as mentioned in a previous comment, if you have a scanner you will probably get a better image by scanning the board. Good luck!
aetienne3493 says:
alright thanks
captthud says:
Jan 22, 2011. 10:02 AM REPLY I started reading this with skepticism - "There's no way to magically generate a schematic from a PCB." While there wasn't any magic* I'm very impressed by your creative use of software and the flow of data. Circuitry aside, this is an excellent introduction for advanced image editing. +10,000 points for doing it all with open source software on Linux. There's so much amazing stuff that people don't know about. I've been using Inkscape and Gimp for a while, but I haven't seen AutoTrace or Dia before. TIme to hit the repositories! *Revealing the PCB holes with masks and channels seemed magical, even if it's just math.
Mike44 says:
Jan 21, 2011. 9:54 PM REPLY Man, this looks like a lot of work, especially doing it in something that looks like MS Paint. Why not just use a real PCB program off the top to map out the board? Place all the components as you spot them out, draw the rats nest in between to however far you need to go, then create the actual PCB. At least I think it would be easier. There's tons of free, basic PCB software out there: http://www.olimex.com/pcb/dtools.html. Even: http://www.suigyodo.com/online/e/index.htm Jan 20, 2011. 9:15 PM REPLY
pellepeloton says:
I might do this to my EEEPC power supply regulator section. I accidentally reversed the polarity when I replaced the car power supply and let the blue smoke out! As you all might know, electronics works with blue smoke ? If you let the blue smoke out, the gadget does not work anymore.
pellepeloton says:
Jan 20, 2011. 9:10 PM REPLY "Michael Jennings is a reverse engineer and what he does is technical jobs for certain companies and as soon as he is done, his memory of the work he has done is wiped out. " That is the simplified plot for Ben Affleck starred movie. Be careful to do this reverse-engineering as some company might want to erase your memory, lol!
jolshefsky says:
Jan 20, 2011. 6:58 AM REPLY Excellent explanations and good use of tools. It would be nice to go straight to something like Eagle, for its electrical rule checking (ERC), but that's obviously yet another headache. I've also been surprised that there's no solid standard for making vector graphics portable and platform-independent. I had done work in AppleWorks and had absolutely no way to get that data into OpenOffice's drawing package. I got a weak copy via some convoluted Encapsulated PostScript; SVG gave me nothing but false starts and dead ends. That reminds me ... I have to get back on that project!
throbscottle says:
Jan 20, 2011. 2:55 PM REPLY If you can output your work from AppleWorks into postscript format, pstoedit will output svm files for openoffice. It will also output schematic files, but I think their usefulness is limited for this.
rammstein2 says:
very nice and much of hard work you put i there!! Anyone knows how to do it in windows??(for the pstoedit part)
throbscottle says:
Find the pstoedit home page - there is a link to a Windows version there.
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
vanmankline says:
GIMP is an open source program that can also be used in windows. It can be found at: http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/
speedhump says:
Jan 20, 2011. 7:22 AM REPLY Photographing a circuit board is difficult to do without a good copy stand and even with one your right-angles always end up not quite right. You need Adobe PhotoShop or a similar application to help you out. First note the actual dimensions of the board. Take your shot (flash doesn't help) so take outside it in daylight on a dull day to eliminate harsh shadows. Filling your viewfinder with circuit board is a sure way to ensure that your image suffers from pincushion or barrel distortion, so pull back a bit and allow a good margin. Put the result up on your screen. Go to IMAGE SIZE and adjust it to the size of your board. Next > SELECT ALL and then > EDIT > TRANSFORM > DISTORT and drag the image so the circuit board fits exactly in the frame. It is easier if you reduce the size of your frame on the screen so you can see corners of your distorted image when you pull them outside the frame.
throbscottle says:
Thanks for the tips!
nubie says:
Sometimes lighting the PCB from the back is helpful. If you have a sparse 2-sided board or a single sided board it can make the traces much easier to see.
Also high voltage and low voltage sections of a circuit will usually be separated on the PCB and it is very easy to see this if you light it from the back. I did this and found I could simply break the CFL high voltage part off of the board in the second picture (I replaced it with LEDs)
throbscottle says:
Unfortunately the board I did this project on is completely opaque, so backlighting was not an option.
LaserDave says:
VERY nice write-up, I am very impressed!! Nobody can accuse you of not including enough detail. :) I am very curious to know how many hours you would estimate (honestly) that you put into this board.
The reason I ask is because I am the same way - when I want to achieve something I won't be stopped by difficulty or time expense to get something like this done. (Lately, it has been 3D technical/mechanical drawings in Sketchup that I put a frighteningly excessive amount of visual detail into, spending 1012hrs/day for 10-14 days to complete, and think nothing of it) Perfectionist much?? It's refreshing to see that there are others that will expend extreme effort, ESPECIALLY when it means the difference of whether or not an electronic item gets discarded. An alternative method that I thought I'd mention might be good for those who are doing simpler boards. I have used it with great results on many occasions, but I do realise that it's not for everyone:- Using a variety of differently-coloured markers, paint the traces as you follow them along the board. Use the same colour along a trace on one side over to the other when encountering a via. Drawing the parts on paper or computer, you can roughly wire point to point as you determine trace routes. When you have drawn a given trace, simply paint over it with black to indicate it is completed. The famous Sharpie markers come in more than two dozen colours, although there will be some that won't show up well on the board. These are "permanent" and hold up well while handling, but a bit of acetone, alcohol, lacquer thinner, WD-40 or other solvent will easily remove the ink. Of course you can use certain colours exclusively for Ground, Power, Data etc. and a million other ways of optimising the process to your taste. It's actually kind of fun too. Thanks for the 'ible, there are many valuable methods and techniques in here that can be used for other purposes too. Also, the SMD Catalogue reference is a gem and exceedingly useful. Cheers from Canada!!
throbscottle says:
Excellent idea - those traces are so hard to keep track of!
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
throbscottle says:
Jan 20, 2011. 2:47 PM REPLY I have just had a look at the pstoedit home page, and found this link for Windows users: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pstoedit/pstoeditsetup350.exe?download You may need to install a couple of extra dll's if you are using a pre-XP version of Windows, which you can find here: http://www.helga-glunz.homepage.t-online.de/pstoedit/msvc-runtimelibs.zip Hopefully version 0.98 of Dia will import svg files correctly and there will be no need for the extra postscript step. On the other hand, using postscript does open up a wide range of alternative formats to use. You takes your choice... For those who are interested in how long it took to do this, it's hard to say. I did a number of multi-hour sessions, but had several false attempts along the way where I had to try a different approach, or re-start a step. I also wrote down these steps and produced illustrations as I went, which took up more time as well. So I'm making a very rough estimate here, maybe 30 to 40 hours including time to work out the methods. Now the method is known and written down, it should be quicker.
mario59 says:
FANTASTIC instructable! SIMPLY AMAZING ! ! ! You taught me alot!
PeterTheUnGreat says:
Superb and inspiring - this is a very nice way to reverse engineer a complex board. Thanks for sharing. Pete
jamwaffles says:
Jan 20, 2011. 12:57 PM REPLY Absolutely brilliant Instructable! This has inspired me to reverse engineer some stuff now :-P Thank you for the how-to and the time you took to write it :-)
rtty21 says:
Subscribed!
combiner says:
Jan 20, 2011. 7:39 AM REPLY I agree: amazing work! I think it is close to what real professionals do, but they have special own developments softwares and - X-rays... Thanks for good article from Finland!
rldkfl says:
more complex boards are produced as multilayer ( more than 2 layers ) http://www.ami.ac.uk/courses/ami4809_pcd/unit_01/images/pcd_ipcbt_imgl.gif
caledonian says:
Jan 17, 2011. 8:54 AM REPLY rldkfl has a good point. Multi-layer boards can actually be just as complex on the inner layers. One technique I found useful was once the board is imaged and the images enhanced as much as possible to isolate the traces, is to layer them on top of each other in Photoshop (etc) with alpha-blending for the layers adjusted as appropriate, and toggling the layer visibility on and off as needed. Granted, I wrote my own custom software to do the vector signal tracing, but still, it was definitely useful to have the layers overlaid with transparency to see the tracings from 2 or more layers at the same time. Jan 17, 2011. 6:30 AM REPLY Thanks for this - excellent illustration. I read somewhere that the inner layers tend to be mainly ground planes and power planes. In this particular project, I identified a power plane as being connected to most of the one-sided holes in the final schematic.
throbscottle says:
t.rohner says:
Jan 20, 2011. 7:26 AM REPLY Very nice use of the graphic tools. But in modern designs, you're almost always lost. Having 5 or 7 layers, there is much more than ground and power planes going on in between. Then you don't see what happens underneath the smd's. And in digital designs, you almost always have some PGA's or FPGA's, not to mention microcontrollers or custom chips. There you can only find out which pin is connected to whatever else, but you have no chance of knowing what they actually do. This is true, even if you have a schematic for the circuit. You normally just don't know, how the stuff is programmed. Hail to the times when components have been mounted "through-hole" on the pcb's. (That was when i had my education in electronics ;-)
criswilson10 says:
Jan 16, 2011. 9:05 PM REPLY If you have a scanner available, I've found them easier to get board pictures than a camera. Also a lot of scanners let you zoom in to get those tiny id numbers on small parts
JesusFreke says:
Haha! I was just about to suggest this same thing!
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/
throbscottle says:
Jan 17, 2011. 6:34 AM REPLY I wish I'd done this! I was put off the idea by thinking the resolution would be too low, but I think that would be outweighed by the picture quality. I'm curious to know what you use board scans for!
criswilson10 says:
Jan 21, 2011. 12:58 PM REPLY I use scanners to scan boards for repair and reverse engineering. Most of the time they are obsolete boards from odd equipment. The last one I did was a controller board for an automated shrink wrap machine from the early 1980s. The manufacturer was out of business and no replacements board was available. So I scanned the front and back of the board in to get the rough trace pattern off the board and to make it easier to read the part values for everything. Jan 17, 2011. 6:52 AM REPLY You can actually get rather insane resolutions on a scanner, something like 1000dpi+. For example, here's a board I had scanned in a while ago - I don't remember what resolution I had scanned it in at, but it wasn't anywhere near the max resolution of the scanner. http://nookdevs.com/images/f/ff/Board_scan.jpg Also, hats off on this bit of reverse engineering! I had had to reverse a low/medium complexity board a while ago, which only used through-hole components (90s era board). I had done it by hand (w/ multimeter..), and that was quite a challenge! The board you are working on is significantly more complex :)
JesusFreke says:
Jan 20, 2011. 12:12 PM REPLY Have to agree there. The default on one of my canon scanners was taking up-wards of 7 to 8 minutes to do a scan! I was bewildered but allowed it to finish, the file was HUGE! I realized why after my photo software stated it could not handle a resolution over 1250 dpi the scanned image was over 3000dpi I then changed the default to 275dpi for scan to computer and 75dpi for copy to paper. There is an Instructable here http://www.instructables.com/id/Take-detailed-photos-with-a-scanner/ that shows using a Scanner for Macro Photography.
jrossetti says:
Jan 16, 2011. 9:33 PM REPLY Amazing work! This obviously takes a lot of time, patience and willpower, I salute you for sticking with it and tackling such a complex board. There's a couple of good instructables here for ring flashes/diffusers, and even a crappy point-and-shoot camera could probably do well enough with the right setup. Great job!
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-reverse-engineer-a-schematic-from-a-circuit/