Is there a service for drawing schematics from and redesigning existing PCBs?

Tornadoboy

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Is there a service for drawing schematics from and redesigning existing PCBs?

I was wondering, is there a service out there where one could send an existing PCB set to and have them draw up a schematic based upon it, and perhaps even resign it to fit on less/smaller boards using modern components? If so can anyone recommend one?

The boardset in question is a large, 5-board stack from an extremely rare game which the ROMs have been dumped, are readily available (and emulated in MAME) and components are more or less available off the shelf. I won't say which game because I don't want to create buzz over something that may or may not happen, not to mention it involves others whom haven't finished forming their opinions on the idea.

Edit: Also note these boards are multi-layered and have internal traces.
 
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Not sure of any service that specifically does that, but the Engineering house of certain places will do stuff like that.

If you want to shoot me a PM, I do this sort of thing as well depending on the requirements.
 
Not sure of any service that specifically does that, but the Engineering house of certain places will do stuff like that.

If you want to shoot me a PM, I do this sort of thing as well depending on the requirements.

Thanks, duly noted, you may be getting that PM later.
 
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I know there are companies out there that do it... dunno how much they charge. Electronix reverse engineered the schems for the Super Nintendo a LONG time ago: http://www.electronix.com/repl-schematics-snes-p-702.html ... IMO they did a good job on them for being completely reverse engineered. You could contact them and see if they'll do it for hire, but I imagine it'd be really expensive. And when you say it has internal traces, is it actually a 6+ layer board, or just 4 layers? 4 layers are usually easy, because the signals are on the outside, and the middle two are just power and ground.

If it's emulated in MAME, it sounds like the reverse engineering has already been done... and if you're trying to reduce size, using an FPGA is probably gonna be your best bet (otherwise, why didn't the company reduce size/cost in the first place?).

DogP
 
Many electronic engineering places can do it - including us - BUT, I think you fail to understand just how much work is involved here..

You could be looking at WEEKS of work and that translates to many MANY thousands of dollars.

As an example, we re-designed a Zaccaria pinball MPU recently with about 30 ICs on the board and that took about $10K worth of time to re-create and then still had minor bugs after the initial run of 100 boards was made.

Your suggestion is no small undertaking. If you only want a few boards forget the idea. If you want a few hundred it might - I stress "might" be barely worthwhile.

What you are describing sounds to me like closer to $50K worth of work.
 
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Many electronic engineering places can do it - including us - BUT, I think you fail to understand just how much work is involved here..

You could be looking at WEEKS of work and that translates to many MANY thousands of dollars.

As an example, we re-designed a Zaccaria pinball MPU recently with about 30 ICs on the board and that took about $10K worth of time to re-create and then still had minor bugs after the initial run of 100 boards was made.

Your suggestion is no small undertaking. If you only want a few boards forget the idea. If you want a few hundred it might - I stress "might" be barely worthwhile.

What you are describing sounds to me like closer to $50K worth of work.

Yeah I was figuring it would be a major undertaking, but this is being considered under the pretense of making it a Kickstarter project, and being that the Star Castle cartridge project for the Atari 2600 brought in over $20,000 it's not out of the realm of possibility, but I understand this may simply be a bridge too far.

How about simply having schematics drawn from the boards, what kind of money does that typically involve?
 
Yeah I was figuring it would be a major undertaking, but this is being considered under the pretense of making it a Kickstarter project, and being that the Star Castle cartridge project for the Atari 2600 brought in over $20,000 it's not out of the realm of possibility, but I understand this may simply be a bridge too far.

How about simply having schematics drawn from the boards, what kind of money does that typically involve?

Once schematics are drawn there are many programs that will 90% automatically do the board layout for you. Drawing up schematics is probably 60~70% of the cost that's why on all of our smaller boards we don't draw schematics at all - we jump straight to the PCB layout phase.
 
Once schematics are drawn there are many programs that will 90% automatically do the board layout for you. Drawing up schematics is probably 60~70% of the cost that's why on all of our smaller boards we don't draw schematics at all - we jump straight to the PCB layout phase.

Yeah that makes sense, that's quite a task in itself taking god knows how many manhours of labor. It's those internal traces that have been the big hang-up in any kind of repro ideas, along with the board count obviously, I wonder if they could be X-rayed by a vet to get images of the internal traces, like what was done with the Pacman Plus dump? Although I suspect all we'd end up with is mostly images of the top traces hiding the internals.
 
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