PCB is an open source package for semiautomated and manual PCB reverse engineering.

PCBRE currently doesn't have any documentation. This will likely change fairly soon.

For support, please join #pcbre on freenode.

For versions distributed with a package manager, you probably want to start pcbre-app. This assumes the package manager has done its job, and hence all dependencies are installed.

For versions distributed standalone, or when working within a venv or test environment, use pcbre-launcher. This will check all dependencies and provide advice on how to resolve them.

PCBRE requires the following dependencies. Some will probably need to come from your systems package manager. Some might come from pip. Some need to be custom installed.

System Packages

• python3 (anything 3.4 or later should work)
• python3-pip (for installing python packages)
• qtpy
  • PySide or PyQt5
• OpenGL
• Cython (required by poly2tri and pypotrace)
• geos (required by shapely, be sure to install geos with development headers)
• capnp (required by pycapnp)
• libspatialindex (required by rtree)
• freetype (required by freetype_py)
• opencv3 (with Python 3 bindings)

Setting up an installation:

virtualenv --system-site-packages -p python3 ~/usr/pcbre/
. ~/usr/pcbre/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt .

Then add ~/usr/pcbre/bin to your path. You can then launch PCBRE by typing "pcbre-launcher"in your shell.

Setting up a dev environment:

virtualenv --system-site-packages -p python3 .env
. .env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt -e .

PCBRE should function correctly on Debian/Ubuntu. Install the following packages using apt:

• python3
• python3-pip
• python3-numpy
• python3-scipy
• python3-pyside
• libspatialindex-dev
• libgeos-dev
• libpotrace-dev
• libagg-dev
• libfreetype6-dev
• cython3

If you are running tests, also install:

• python3-mock

The following libraries may have issues when installed using the package manager, but are still required:

• libcapnp-dev (outdated, you need 0.5.2, just make install if your distro lacks this version)
• libopencv-dev (outdated, you need 3.0.0 with BUILD_NEW_PYTHON_SUPPORT -- follow the instructions here, but make sure to use the release version of OpenCV 3.0.)

Install the packages listed above in Python Packages using pip (except for mock, which you should have already installed if you need it), and you should be good to go with prerequisites.

PCBRE is still in the process of being ported to Windows, and does not yet function correctly.

Install Python 3.4 (32-bit or 64-bit, depending on system)
Use pip to install the following binary packages from http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs:

numpy scipy PySide Shapely PyOpenGL PyOpenGL_accelerate opencv_python Cython

Binary .whl packages for rtree, freetype_py, and poly2tri will be available soon. This is still a work-in-progress.
[py]capnp is currently an issue on Windows, since it heavily uses C++11, which is not available with the Visual C++ 2010 runtime used by Python 3.4.

PCBRE is still in the process of being ported to Mac OS X, and does not yet function correctly. It is being developed with the above-listed dependencies installed from Homebrew with some packages from the Homebrew-science tap.

• Cannot mix incompatible Qt library (version 0x....) with this library (version 0x.....) when launching PCBRE.
  • Your PySide2 and QT library versions are out of sync. Make sure PySide2 is built for the same Qt as your system QT. Double-check for PySide2 in a venv or python user directory

All source with the excluding of the following is licensed under GPLv2-or-later. That said, if you need a different license, feel free to contact me. I'm likely to grant such requests, unless its to make a commercial, closed source fork of the entire codebase.

csrc/edtaa3func.* is licensed under the license in its file headers (BSD) pysrc/pcbre/resources/Vera.ttf is under the Bistream Vera Fonts copyright (BSD-like)