Preamble / The first things to know...

1 - Boardviews are NOT bundled with FlexBV

• FlexBV is a boardview file & schematic viewer for your own files.

• FlexBV's only restriction is the file type of the boardview that you want to use. Boardview files are available readily across the internet with a single googling query.

• It is illegal to distribute other company's boardview & schematic files, as such FlexBV does not come with a complimentary bundle ( as much as it would be an excellent starter pack ).

• FlexBV is akin to having AutoCAD, you can view CAD files but AutoCAD doesn't bundle Boeing or BMW designs

• Take a look at https://badcaps.net , sign up, it's free ( no tokens, monthly fees or other bollocks! ), and it has excellent availability of most boardviews and schematics that you may want.

2 - FlexBV is NOT a subscription service

• When you buy a licence of FlexBV, you are buying the right to own that version perpetually.

• FlexBV will not expire

• You can upgrade to a future major version for a reduced fee if you want to

• You do not need internet connectivity to use FlexBV

• You can migrate your licence to any supported OS

• You may install FlexBV on multiple machines with the same licence as long as you are the only user of that licence ( ie, you cannot have two workstations being concurrently used by techs, that would require two licences ).

Understanding Boardviews and their usage

What is a boardview?

A boardview is a representation of the physical layout of a circuit board, as opposed to a schematic which is a representation of the logical design of a circuit. A boardview is a form of a CAD file.

A boardview is generally not a full design file; instead a boardview provides sufficient information to know where to locate a part on the board and what other parts it is connected to. A boardview often does not contain routing/trace or inner layer information.

At the very minimum, a boardview consists only of a list of pins/pads with the following information;

With only that simple amount of information a boardview can be constructed, often it's useful to have a board outline as well but it's not a necessity. Package outlines can be deduced/generated from the grouping of the pins with the same part.

Most of the Macbook brd files contain only this information (along with an outline), so when you look at the boardview, what you're seeing as parts/package-outlines has all been generated from a simple list of pins.

Beyond the fundamental data requirements for a boardview some formats additionally add pad and package outlines (such as Teboview and GenCAD) and additionally some contain part data (value, ratings, manufacturer ID).

How a Boardview works with a Schematic ?

For a very long time we only needed to rely on a schematic together with the physical board that we needed to repair, because the PCB was the boardview in real life; PCBs had the part names printed by the parts which enabled you to cross-reference with the schematic ( and sometimes the schematic would help locating parts using a coarse grid coordinate system ).

With modern surface mount boards and extremely high part densities it has become impractical to rely on the physical PCB as the real-life boardview; parts are too small and there's no space to print the part names; this is now where boardview files and software have become a necessity - without them there's no way to know where R7002 is on a board or to know what part it was that has burned out on the board that you need to replace, even if you have a schematic.

Bringing the boardview together with the schematic allows us to now know the name of parts at a given location, and know the location of parts in the schematic. FlexBV ties together the boardview and schematic so that you can cross reference between them with out having to manually copy-paste/search, saving a lot of time and frustration.

Having a boardview lets you see all the other parts on the board that are connected to the same network/rail.

Having a boardview lets you see what other parts are in the same region as a damaged area on the board.

Recommended file organisation

For the optimal utilisation of FlexBV, it's recommended that you store boardview files in a one-per-folder configuration so that all associated files / data for the board are contained in a single location.

As an example; if you have a Macbook board 820-00165.brd file, store it in a location such as;

c:\boards\macbooks\820-00165

within this folder associated files will be contained without risk of conflict of other boards.

Name the schematic PDF the same as the boardfile and FlexBV will automatically load this with the BRD without requiring any additional intervention.

It's strongly recommended that you strip away any excess characters/naming of the boardview file so that the name of the file reflects the board file ID explicitly; ie, instead of J113 820-00165_vina.brd rename it to be 820-00165.brd, this will make the automatic searching of the board on Openboarddata simpler with more chances of success of finding a match ( see https://openboarddata.org for a list of currently supported boards )

After use, a board file folder will look similar to the following;

​x
820-00165-bottom.jpg
820-00165.brd
820-00165_brd.sqlite3
820-00165.obdata
820-00165.obdlocal
820-00165.obdlog
820-00165.obdq
820-00165.pdf
820-00165.sqlite3
820-00165-top.jpg

An organisation tree structure similar to below is strongly suggested;

xxxxxxxxxx
Boards
    Apple
        macbooks
            820-00165
            820-00840
            820-02020
            ...
            820-02292
        iPhones
            iPhone6
            iPhone6S
            ...
            iPhoneX
    ASUS
        laptops
        desktops
    Lenovo
        

Starting FlexBV

Initially loading FlexBV will result in a blank starting display

At the bottom left you should see your licenced details and the current version

Menubar icons

Loading a Boardview

Use File>Open or select an existing board from the history list.

For the purpose of demonstration, we'll load the Macbook A1466 820-00165 logic board which is well documented and also has OBData support.

• The "Olive" colour theme is selected

• Default mouse right click behaviour is to search (ctrl-click for context menu)

The FlexBV boardview window is on the left, the schematic on the right.

You can manipulate the position of the board using;

• Click-hold and drag with the mouse

• Scroll wheel to adjust zoom

• Middle click to flip between board sides

• <and > keys to rotate the board

Board Preferences

Board>Preferences

Schematic file

Selecting the schematic for the board file is normally automatic if you follow the file organisation layout recommendation. If FlexBV does not find a matching schematic automatically you can manually select one using the Select button.

OpenBoardData (OBData) configuration / board selection

Search for board code

Type in the board code in the Search String : field and press the Search Server button. NOTE It's important that you use the minimum / cleanest board code. For a list of currently submitted boards check the OBData site at https://openboarddata.org

Select match

The server will respond with a list of possible matches for the search string. If there are no matches check manually at the OBData server site.

####

Download OBData

Select the board that matches your file and then click Download Data

If the data download is successful you should see the Net data lists populated and also perhaps the component data lists. You can also check on the info panel (right side bar) to see if there are any repair solutions added.

Part hover

Moving the mouse pointer over a part will bring up a tooltip indicating the part name and possible information about the part

Pin Hover

Moving the mouse over a pin of a part will bring up details about the pin in the part and any associated OBData information ( in this case the expected diode mode value of the net and the normal running voltage)

Selecting a pin (network)

Clicking on a pin in a part will select the pin and all other parts connected to the same network. Lines will be drawn to all the other parts on the board sides allowing for quick and easy examination of where the network is present on the board

Pin/Part Context Menu

Depending on the configuration of 'Program Preferences>Mouse Keyboard Preferences' a context menu will be available either via right-clicking the mouse, or ctrl-right-clicking.

The context menu provides schematic search options for the net and/or part as well as an expansion of the OBData (if present) and part and/or pin(network) data.

Annotations can also be added

Find part in schematic from boardview

To locate the part on the schematic from the boardview, right-click the mouse while hovered over the blank inner body of the part

Find network in schematic from boardview

To locate the network on the schematic from the boardview, right-click on the mouse while hovered over the specific pin of the part

Find part in boardview from schematic

Right click on the part name in the schematic, it will momentarily turn inverted-background and the boardview will update to show the part as a selected item

Find network in boardview from schematic

Right click on the network name in the schematic, it will momentarily turn inverted-background around the name and the boardview will update to show the selected net

View Menu

Searching

Search for component / network (ctrl-f)

One of those most common operations, is searching for a part name, or a network name

Bringing up the search dialog the number of search fields is set in Settings>Program Preferences>FlexBV Preferences>Search Columns

Start typing in the component (or net) name that you're searching for, and FlexBV will begin to build a list of possible matches

Clicking Search will result in all current list items being added to the selected parts/nets list, or you can complete the search selection refined down to the specific part;

Search controls

Part Finder

The part finder feature allows you to search through a collecting of schematics looking for a specific part that you require which may be present on another board that you have on hand. This feature was originally created to reduce the number of Macbook boards required to keep on hand.

Search>Part Find

Pressing the search button will begin the process of examining the available schematics

As matches are found the successfully matched schematics will be listed

The search can be stopped at any time by pressing the Stop Search button

Clicking on any of the "HIT" schematics will result in a separate window opening with the schematic and the first search hit highlighted; if there is a matching boardview file this will additionally be opened in a separate window independent of your search instance.

NOTE: The part is not highlighted in the boardview because the search is for a component type/name and there's no way of correlating the respective board part number from this information, however with the component highlighted in the schematic you can right-click on the associated part name and it will be highlighted in the boardview.

More complex searches are useful for finding parts with multiple parameters needing to be matched

Searching for a 1uF 16V 0201 size capacitor; we break this down in to 1uF, 16V, and 201 (substring). The reason for the separation of the attributes is because they're frequently listed as separate blocks of text around the component, as opposed to a single line.

Sometimes you will have to adjust how you utilise the paramters and perhaps tighten down the detection radius to avoid false positives; it's a bit of an artform but it can save you a lot of time and a lot of money.

Settings

Program Preferences

Settings>Program Preferences

FlexBV Preferences

PDF / Schematic viewer Preferences

Keyboard / Mouse preferences

Multimeter preferences

Part Data Display preferences

Pin Data Display preferences

OpenBoardData preferences

Do not change these values unless you have a very specific reason to do so

Jobs preferences

Grids, Origins and overlay preferences

Debugging preferences

Colour Preferences

FlexBV supports theme files. The location of the files can be found by inspecting Help>About>Theme Path. By default four (4) themes are generated initially

• Light

• Dark

• Olive

• RobBrown

To create your own theme you can copy one of the existing files (*.fbvtheme) to a new name in the theme folder and FlexBV will automatically detect its availability

NOTE: Adjusting the colours of the theme modify the theme file immediately

Exporting Files

FlexBV currently supports exporting any loaded boardview file in to the following formats

SVG Export

File->Export SVG

While not used as an actual boardviewing format, exporting to SVG is useful for other purposes perhaps such as CAM/CAD work and presentations or task/job specific diagram work.

The exported SVG is grouped as follows;

• Top

• • Outline

  • Parts

  • • Pins (with network names)

       

• Bottom

• • Outline

  • Parts

  • • Pins (with network names)

BVR3 Export

File->Export BVR3

• Default .bvr extension

• Created by FlexBV, it's intentionally a very verbose, non-referencing, and highly compressible text format.

• Supported by OpenBoardview as well as FlexBV. Other programs can easily support BVR3 due to the plain text style.

• Not intended as a design file format.

• Supports part and pad outlines

Supported File Formats

Configuration Paths and Files

...to be filled.

Logging

FlexBV provides an internal logging service and you can submit your log files for analysis if you are having issues

Use Help>View Log To inspect the current (live) log file. The log file is overwritten with each new session of FlexBV.

Click the [Submit Log] button to upload the log for analysis. Support will receive notification that the log file has been uploaded. It is recommended that you also send an email to pldaniels@gmail.com with details about your situation/fault.

END OF MANUAL