The Art of PCB Reverse Engineering: Tools & Techniques: August 2018

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

Saturday, August 25, 2018

80 Countries and Counting...

Four and a half months after hitting 70 countries and 6,066 page views, my blog has finally reached out to readers in a total of 80 countries and 8,448 page views.

While it is no mean feat of an achievement, I believe more can be done to create awareness of its existence if readers would simply recommend my blog and work to friends and post it in electronics forums or discussion groups.

If you have benefited from what I shared, or even enjoyed what is posted, then please do me a kind favor by sharing the link (visio-for-engineers.blogspot.com). Better still, drop me a line (comment) so I know what my readers are thinking or would like to see in the blog.

Thanks again for visiting and making it happened.

Monday, August 6, 2018

Artosyn Drones

Received a query from a blog reader:

I just started a job this month which requires to RE some functions on a RC controller which has an Artosyn AR8001 and AR8003 chip on them but I am unable to find the datasheet on the internet. Any idea to approach this?

My reply:

The AR8001/AR8003 are a complimentary pair of image transmission modules customed parts by the Chinese company Artosyn Microelectronics. It is therefore unlikely you'll find any datasheet online for these two chips, especially if the company only sells their drone products and not the standalone ICs.

If you're doing PCB-RE just to understand the design, or to produce similar products, the only workable way is backward signal annotations:

1. Treat the AR8001/AR8003 as black boxes
2. Locate pin 1 as reference
3. Find out the power and ground pins
4. Trace out the address, data and control pins using known ICs or onboard CPU
5. Since these are image transmission chips, look out for video amplifiers and trace their pins back to these ICs.

Hope the above pointers will give you something to work on.

An example of a RC controlled drone with imaging capability:

Partial list of main component parts (Chinese descriptions):

Thursday, August 2, 2018

From Sketches to Streamlined

After some deliberation, I've decided to include the Rigol DS1052E into the Case Studies chapter of my trilogy book. As mentioned, someone by the name Hellene had done a superb job in reverse engineering this piece of equipment and placed the schematic diagrams online. Though he did not complete the whole unit, it does provide a good picture of a commercial digital oscilloscope, except for one problem: it's done in rough pencil sketches.

Below is a sample of the Channel 1's front-end:

I'd figure if I want to include his work, I'll need to clean up the schematics and do an overhaul using Visio. It's definitely much easier if I just copy and paste from Hellene's work but my sense of being a professional writer got the better of me. Here is the Visio rendition:

The rest are still in the works but readers will be pleased to know that they are getting a better deal with these pretty schematics when they buy my book. It will not be anytime soon, but I'm hoping that it will be released before the end of this year.

Meantime, do go to Amazon or the icon or menu links above to take a look at my other PCB-RE books, and consider supporting my hard work through honest purchase so I can continue writing and drawing these beautiful electronic artworks. Thanks!

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