An nameless reverse engineer has launched a high-resolution boardview of Nintendo’s Swap Lite circuit board — created by desoldering all of the parts and soldering flying wires of their place, tracing every pad to its location on 2,444 high-resolution images.

“That is the output information for a course of I solo-developed for extracting the netlist from an assembled Printed Circuit Board [PCB], on this case, a Nintendo Swap Lite logic board,” the nameless engineer explains. “Electrical parts are soldered to uncovered mounting pads on the PCB, and layers of copper type connections between these pads creating electrical circuits. The complete checklist of those interconnects known as the netlist, and when mixed with the half and pad geometries, represent a boardview. Couple that boardview with reference photographs of each side of the PCB, and you’ve got the output information.”

Making a boardview from a PCB’s design recordsdata is an automatic course of, however creating one from an already-manufactured PCB is one thing fully totally different. Within the case of this explicit PCB, a part of that course of was spending a yr and round $10,000 placing collectively a course of and the mandatory software program — together with a method to seize panoramic 6,000 pixels per inch (PPI) photographs, assign half and pad information to set places on the photographs, and the creation of a customized probe board which might energy up any arbitrary variety of pins one-by-one and browse the ensuing change in state.

This latter gadget is undeniably helpful, however you may want a gradual had to make use of it: the engineer first captured photographs of the board and manually marked half and pad geometry earlier than desoldering each single part from the board; a digital multimeter was then employed to manually commerce every pad’s connection to floor; lastly, nearly 2,000 particular person flying leads had been soldered from the probe PCB to the gadget on take a look at to map all connections and the way they have an effect on different pads on the board.

“My background is over a decade in Electronics Contract Manufacturing [ECM] serving the medical, aerospace, army, and industrial sectors,” the nameless engineer writes. “Greater than half of that point is as a SMT Course of Technician, with full learn/write entry to thousands and thousands of {dollars} of state-of-the-art tools. Therein lies the lure: you find yourself overspecialized, depending on another person’s unaffordable tools. Sprinkle in some month-to-month funds, insurance coverage, ever-moving goalposts, and the mass psychosis of contemporary company dogma; it turns into an elaborate jail.”

“Utilizing 100% of my willpower to make no additional point out of Sisyphus and The Boulder; this venture is an experiment in fusing Work-From-Residence web freelancing with grasp electrical soldering, whereas nonetheless contributing meaningfully to society,” the engineer continues. “I may open a restore store however that is principally disassembling and reassembling gadgets, and troubleshooting electrical circuits. Comparatively, little or no soldering. Pander to algorithms for advert cash? Shill affiliate hyperlinks? Resell junk instruments? Additionally not soldering.”

The complete write-up is accessible on the engineer’s web site, µSoldering; the boardview will be downloaded through Torrent. “You’ll have seen the panoramas are literally at 2,000 PPI,” the engineer notes. “That is as a result of the 6,000 PPI variations are half a gigapixel, every. This causes issues. With every part.”