WIP: SprintLayout (.lay6) import in OpenBoardView for logic board diagnostic/repair

[mmu_man]

I recently helped reverse-engineering the Teboview (tvw) format to add support for it in OpenBoardView / FlexBV (Paul Daniels' closed fork which adds some features like both sides at once). Those are heavily used by people like Louis Rossmann to repair laptops, by making it possible to browse the board view and finding which pins are connected, and what signal (net) they are on. This allows for faster continuity checks, knowing where to route bodge wires to, and even share continuity measurement from a known working board to compare to.

This week-end I was bored so I started looking at support for the SprintLayout format (*.lay6), which it seems is used by many here to recreate logic boards, I guess not everyone knows about KiCAD… It's not ready yet but at least it now shows all the pads on @Kai Robinson 's Mac SE board without crashing:

 

[davidg5678]

Awesome --I hope you can get this working! This is something I dreamed about several years ago when the first reverse engineered schematics were being created. I think that OpenBoardView would be super useful for troubleshooting work: instead of needing to look over schematics to find where a trace is meant to connect, you could just click on a diagram and see the corresponding areas of the PCB light up.

 

[max1zzz]

Very nice! I have always thought it was a shame the free sprint viewer didn't let you see connections (The full version dose) so having support in OBV would be brilliant

I guess not everyone knows about KiCAD…

Sprint gets used allot as it allows you to load a scan and trace the board without having to generate a schematic first, also making custom footprints is insanely easy in sprint making it far far quicker to use sprint than KICAD. That said I would love to be able to import the boards to KICAD afterwards as making signifigent alterations to a board in sprint is truly headache inducing!

 

[mmu_man]

Sprint gets used allot as it allows you to load a scan and trace the board without having to generate a schematic first, also making custom footprints is insanely easy in sprint making it far far quicker to use sprint than KICAD. That said I would love to be able to import the boards to KICAD afterwards as making signifigent alterations to a board in sprint is truly headache inducing!

Well in theory you can also do it in KiCAD, though it may be less streamlined and might complain about missing netlist.
This Hackaday article mentions some way to do it in KiCAD:

The trick is to get the image scaled perfectly and convert it to a component on a user layer

I suppose some plugin could make this even simpler.
It should also be possible to write KiCAD importer, although more involved than just listing pads and nets for OBV. But then you'd be able to do the schematics from it, at least have it add the parts automatically.

 

[max1zzz]

This Hackaday article mentions some way to do it in KiCAD

Hmm intresting, I might give that a go someday..... I have a 6 layer board to do at some point which sprint currently doesn't support

 

[mmu_man]

Ok, trying to get the outline isn't as easy as I thought, of course it's not just a nice polygon; but a discontinuous set of polylines + arcs out of order…

 

[mmu_man]

Aaaaaaaand we have an outline \o/

Much cleaner with some trigonometry to approximate the arcs. Still some holes not hollow, maybe some duplicated points somewhere…