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, October 15, 2021

New Desktop

Finally, after 13 years of service and a few interim upgrades, it's time to replace my old faithful E8400 core 2 dual desktop which is showing signs of aging. This time, instead of assembling from scratch, I decided to just order from an online shopping platform. After some comparisons and reading the reviews, this is my choice:

It is an AMD Ryzen 3 3200G CPU running on an ASRock A320M-HDV R4.0 motherboard with 8GB of DDR4 3200MHz memory, housed in a Tecware Nova M mini ATX tower casing with three fans. It came with a 250GB SSD and Windows 10 pre-installed. Price: Sgd 582.

Since the motherboard has a M.2 interface, I was tempted to add an NVMe SSD to give me the extra bit of data storage. Price: Sgd 50.

All in all, I spent a total of Sgd 632 (about 2 months of what I earned from my books) which is quite a good deal. The new PC is fast and incredibly quiet unlike the sound of CPU fan from the old PC which can be annoying at times. Best of all, it has TPM 2.0 which supports Windows 11, though I will not be upgrading to the new OS anytime soon until Microsoft fixes all the bugs and release a stable edition.

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