To My Readers



If this is the first time you're visiting my blog, thank you. Whether you're interested or just curious to find out about PCB reverse engineering (PCB-RE), I hope you'll find something useful here.

This blog contains many snippets of the content in my books to provide a more detailed overall sampling for my would-be readers to be better informed before making the purchase. Of course, the book contains more photos and nice illustrations, as evidence from its cover page. Hopefully, this online trailer version will whet your appetite enough to want to get a copy for yourself.

Top Review

I started doing component level repair of electronics with (and without) schematics more than 40 years ago, which activity often involves reverse-engineering of printed circuit boards. Although over the years my technical interests have shifted into particle beam instrumentation, electron microscopy, and focused ion beam technology fields, till this day——and more often than not——PCB repairs have returned multiple multi-million-dollar accelerators, FIB, and SEM instruments back to operation, delivering great satisfaction and some profit.

Many of the methods described by Keng Tiong in great details are similar to the approaches I've developed, but some of the techniques are different, and as effective and useful as efficient and practical. Systematic approach and collection of useful information presented in his books are not only invaluable for a novice approaching PCB-level reverse engineering, but also very interesting reading and hands-on reference for professionals.

Focus on reverse engineering instead of original design provides unique perspective into workings of electronics, and in my opinion books by Keng Tiong (I've got all three of them) are must-read for anybody trying to develop good understanding of electronics——together with writings by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill, Phil Hobbs, Jim Williams, Bob Pease, Howard Johnson and Martin Graham, Sam Goldwasser, and other world's top electronics experts.

Valery Ray
Particle Beam Systems Technologist

Friday, August 4, 2017

Progress Update

Currently, I'm writing the final chapter in the Fundamentals (Section 1) of my book. It deals with manual PCB-RE, the advantages of doing it by hand, the types of PCBs, the need for strategies working with different types of boards, and more recently the steps involved with PCB cloning, which I've laid out in six steps. Before moving on to PCB Reversing, I mentioned one interesting Java program which I found online, while searching for raster to Gerber conversion as an alternative option for those who may not want to learn how to use a PCB layout program.

I downloaded the package from Sourceforge, installed the latest Java, setup the environment and path in the system variables, then fired up the program from the command prompt. For a test drive, I loaded a moderately complex board layout, set the color tolerance to 50, and selected the top (red), bottom (blue), silkscreen (yellow) and drill layers (brown):


The results are pretty good, though there are certain improvements that need to be made before it can be a really useful program. For those interested to see it in action, there is a YouTube video online at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdQ_jO0g25A

I still have two chapters in waiting for Section 2, coming from an industrial engineer on FPT and JTAG. Hopefully, I don't have to wait too long for the first drafts to start integrating the contents into their respective chapters. I really hope to get the book ready for release by end August, or latest early September.

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