does a reverse-engineering EDA tool exist?

[Eric Schlaepfer]

I've gone through this a few times myself. There are a few approaches.

One is to use a schematic tool like Kicad to place all the ICs first, then
add the wires and rearrange things as you buzz out the connections.

Another approach uses an intermediate step where you enter all the buzzed
out connections into a spreadsheet, then go from the spreadsheet to the
schematic. You can mark completed rows in the sheet so it's easier to keep
track of your progress.

What I've done in the past is to image both sides of a 2-layer board, pull
it into GIMP, then trace out the traces and enter them into schematic. It
won't work on >2 layer boards, although if a 4-layer board only uses the
inner layers for power and ground planes, you can cheat a bit. For pads
tied to power or ground, you can often shine a light from the back and look
for the thermal "spokes" tying it to the plane.

There is also a program called Sprint-Layout which I have not used but lets
you place a reference photo underneath a board layout. One of the Amiga
people have used it to reverse engineer the A3640 CPU board:
http://wordpress.hertell.nu/?page_id=514 (I'd check out his page anyway
because he also describes his spreadsheet method.) I have also heard (but
not personally confirmed) that Diptrace lets you do that too.



On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 2:51 PM Al Kossow via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:

> To draw out the schematics for the Displaywriter I have a bunch of boards
> to trace out,
> and I don't want to do the usual "scribble on yellow pad"
> to do it. Has someone written a graphical tool for doing this?
>
> What I would like to find is a tool that puts up a bunch of footprints
> with internal IC functions
> shown, then a way to rapidly enter the buzzed out interconnections,
> generating a netlist.
>
> This is exactly backwards workflow from normal schematic entry and pcb
> layout.
>
> I suspect I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and write it..
>
>
>
>