From PCB to schematic

[AngelodibariMQVK6]

Hi there. 

Sometimes I am in need to understand how a board works while troubleshooting swiching power supply.

So I was wondering if I can replicate the pcb design of the faulty device, placing its parts into pdb design  and get its schematics from there. Others pcb design software can do sort of this (example CIRCAD) starting from pcb images wich can be traced inside the pcb design software.

Any thoughts on this?

Thank you

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @AngelodibariMQVK6,

I hope you're doing well. Depending on how much information is on the PCB itself it may be possible to reverse engineer the design. With that said, in EAGLE you can't extract a schematic from a PCB. Ideally you would figure out the design from studying the PCB and then redraw a schematic in EAGLE and then from there do the layout.

If you don't need the schematic then you could technically just redraw the board but without information about the design intent I don't think that will do you much good.

Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you.

Best Regards,