Capturing the track layout on polyester pcb - I've just tried holding
white card laid 45 degrees to the component side and illuminating the card
with a bright light, masking off around the board with opaque card.
Photographing and then greyscaling and upping the contrast, loses the small
component shadows. Giving a very usefull track layout with a bit of manual
touching up for big component shadows etc .
Other photos for resistor values and overall views plus manually recording
overlay numbers that are hidden, transistor types, capacitor values etc

Now the fun bit, it would be nice to expose, onto rubber sheet, pcb etch
fashion. Mark node numbers and stretch into straight lines the DC rails and
one or more other major lines and then manually cut and bridge or whatever
for first stage schematicing.
Anyone know of a pc application that does this stretching of a digitised
image under human control.
cut-down example without any manual retouching of the photo stage
http://home.graffiti.net/diverse:graffiti.net/pcb1.jpg
http://home.graffiti.net/diverse:graffiti.net/pcb1.jpg
http://home.graffiti.net/diverse:graffiti.net/pcb1.jpg

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Diverse Devices, Southampton, England
electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on
http://home.graffiti.net/diverse:graffiti.net/