You hold in your hand a circuit board from a product you didn’t make. How does the thing work? What a daunting question, but it’s both solvable and approachable if you know what you’re doing. The good news is that Eric Schlaepfer knows exactly what he’s doing and boiled down the process of reverse engineering printed circuit boards into this excellent workshop. It was presented live during the 2020 Hackaday Remoticon, and the edited video, which you’ll find below, was just published. Slides for the talk have been published on the workshop project page.
Need proof that he has skills that we all want? Last year Eric successfully reverse-engineered the legendary Sound Blaster audio card and produced his own fully-functional drop-in replacement called the Snark Barker. And then re-engineered it to work with the ancient MCA bus architecture. Whoa.
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Eric tackles the challenge in two parts. The first is to generate a bill of materials by harvesting as much information as possible, and then to fill in the rest of the details with liberal use of search engines and datasheets. He pulls everything into a spreadsheet, with columns for the parts designators printed on the board (U1, R53, C4, etc.), package type which you kind of get the hang of with experience, topmark (printed on the parts), and the part number gleaned from the above.
The next step is to reverse engineer the circuit board itself by taking high-resolution images, sometimes removing parts from the board to do so, and ..
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