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

Tuesday, January 31, 2023

Top Three Posts

Since February 2017 when I started blogging about using Microsoft Visio to do PCB-RE, I have posted 287 write-ups to date. Not all are related to the PCB-RE topics, though I would think the figure comes to over two-thirds. I don't particularly bother about the statistics, i.e. the number of times each post is read, but out of curiosity I did a scan to see which of the posts come in the top three.

Here are the findings:

1. Joe Grand's CV (read 914 times, link)
2. Artosyn Drones (read 812 times, link)
3. Old But Not Obsolete (read 664 times, link)

You can click on the 'link' to read the post, if you've not already done so. It's not surprising that Joe Grand (aka Kingpin) has the highest hit, being the renown hacker that he is. The Artosyn drones seem to be of great interest among my readers, for obvious reasons too. What surprises me, though, is the number of people who are still looking for the old DOS OrCAD EDA suite, which went out of circulation after its competitor Cadence bought over the company in 1999 and migrated the software to Windows.

But as they say, good legacy software never dies; it just lives on in another hardware host that permits it to thrive in. 


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