[sdiy-interim] Reverse engineering printed circuit boards

[Rainer Buchty]

>I'm mostly interested in cloning for personal use at this point.

So all you want to do is desoldering the original board, scanning it and 
doing replacement PCBs?

In that case you could place rulers on all 4 edges of the PCB prior to 
scanning to get a feeling how much the scanner warps the picture and 
eventually apply some de-warping using your favorite picture processing 
software, assuming that the warping is at least half-way manageable.

For through-hole proper de-warping probably doesn't matter as much as a 
a bigger drill (like 1mm instead of 0.8mm) will easily compensate minor 
offsets. 

That way I was copying/re-scaling PCB layouts from print magazines back 
2,5 decades ago and it worked rather good. Never had problems with 
warping/non-linearities. But then, that wasn't quite the time of SMT~

Not sure, though, if there's any software which translates one or two 
layers of PCB scans into some sort of netlist to be imported into one of 
the more common schematic/PCB design programs.

Rainer


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