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A free scan shows the junk files, broken settings and background clutter dragging Windows down - then fixes them in one click.Free scan · Windows 10 & 11An anonymous electronics engineer reconstructed a boardview of a manufactured Nintendo Switch Lite logic board by photographing both sides, removing and identifying components, tracing visible connections, and electrically testing the remaining connections with a custom probe board. The project author reports stitching 2,444 photographs into two panoramas and building a netlist from the measurements. The work is documented in the µSoldering project account and covered independently by Hackster.io.
What a boardview shows
A boardview combines a PCB’s netlist—the list of electrical interconnections—with the geometry of its parts and pads. That lets someone inspect where components sit and which pads belong to the same electrical connection. The µSoldering author describes the output this way: “The full list of these interconnects is called the netlist, and when combined with the part and pad geometries, constitute a boardview.”
The Switch Lite project also provides images of both sides of the board. Its goal was to reconstruct connectivity and layout from a physical, already-manufactured board, rather than generate a boardview from original design files. The project page describes the latter as automated by comparison, but does not give side-by-side measurements of time or accuracy.
How the Switch Lite boardview was reconstructed
The method combined imaging and manual annotation with electrical measurements. It was not an automated scan of an intact console: components were removed, pads were probed, wires were attached, and observations were recorded.
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- Photograph both board sides. The author first photographed and stitched the bottom side, removed RF shields, then photographed and stitched the top side. The two images were refined for geometric and color alignment.
- Mark parts and pads. The panoramas were imported into a custom GUI, where the author drew component and pad outlines.
- Remove and identify components. Each component was desoldered into a uniquely identified bin, with its presumed reference designator recorded.
- Identify ground pads. With the pads exposed, the author used a digital multimeter in continuity mode to check each pad against the board ground plane and recorded the ground connections.
- Map visible connections. Pads joined by visible traces in the board’s two outer layers were grouped into net fragments.
- Probe hidden connections. Wires from a custom extractor PCB were connected to those fragments. The board powered pins in sequence and logged which other fragments changed state, providing evidence to merge fragments into a netlist.
The author calls the approach three “novel-ish” innovations: high-resolution, geometrically and color-accurate panoramas; a GUI for recording part and pad geometry; and a custom PCB that powers pins one at a time while reading the states of other pins. “Novel-ish” is the author’s characterization, not an independently established finding.
What the project numbers mean
The following counts and timings are figures reported by the project author on the page published February 11, 2024. They describe this project, not typical industry costs or workloads, and have not been independently audited.
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| Project detail | Author-reported figure |
|---|---|
| Photographs stitched into two panoramas | 2,444 |
| Parts desoldered and binned | 760 |
| Wires used | 1,917 |
| Solder joints | Approximately 30,176 |
| Soldering time | About three weeks |
| Development of the process, software, and hardware | Over a year and over $10,000 |
The title’s “6,000 PPI” refers to the stated resolution of the panoramas, not to a downloadable image size that is necessarily convenient to view. The author says each full-resolution panorama was around half a gigapixel and too problematic to work with; a later note on the project page says the panoramas are served or viewed at 2,000 PPI.
How to view the boardview
The project page directs readers to download OpenBoardView, obtain and unzip the release data, then open Switch Lite Logic Board.bvr. Its instructions describe using the viewer’s controls to inspect parts and pad nets, zoom, and flip between board sides. The page links to Torrent and Internet Archive downloads, but the availability of those files and compatibility with current software can change.
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The author used simple part and pad outlines because a more complex rendering feature was unsupported in OpenBoardView at the time. The page also says the data files were cross-compatible with FlexBV5; treat that as a reported compatibility detail rather than a guarantee about current versions.
What the reconstruction does not include
The project is a boardview and netlist reconstruction, not a complete electrical characterization of every component or a step-by-step repair guide. The author says measurements of the binned parts’ electrical properties were not completed. A basic, low-accuracy LCR meter was available, but the author expected the results to be low-quality and incomplete.
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The author also reports not having an ultrasonic cleaner. The project page says ultrasonic cleaning should take place after RF-shield removal and before extraction, and warns that flux residue could create false-positive connections between net fragments. This is a limitation the author identifies in the described method; it does not establish a measured error rate for the resulting boardview.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why reconstructing a manufactured board is difficult
When original PCB design files are available, a boardview can be generated from their existing layout and connectivity data. Reconstructing one from a physical board means recovering that information indirectly. This project illustrates the workload: creating usable board images, documenting geometry, removing hundreds of components, checking ground and visible traces, then using an extractor PCB to investigate connections that could not be read from the outer layers alone.
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The result is useful as a navigable record of board geometry and inferred connectivity, but its scope should be understood in light of the author’s stated omissions and measurement process. The project page is the primary source for its method and figures; Hackster.io provides a separate account of the same work.
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