teboviewformat

An attempt to reverse engineer enough of the Teboview (tvw) file format to allow Boardview generation

NO FURTHER UPDATES

After 2 years the format has been reverse engineered however due to the extensive work required and personal investment, I'll be keeping this one closed until such time that I've recouped my time investment ( perhaps $10~15k USD worth ). You however can now obtain FlexBV Free, Demo or licenced versions at https://pldaniels.com/flexbv5 which provide boardviewer support for this format.

Massive thanks to @WerWolv and his fantastic ImHex project, without which this decoding would have taken even longer. If you want to try reverse engineering file formats I strongly recommend you take a look at ImHex available at https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex

Intro

The teboview file (.tvw) is an EDA type package which includes all details for the production and testing of PCBs. The purpose of this decoding attempt is so that we can write an import/reading module in order to view a simplified version in boardview packages such as OpenBoardview.

The bulk of the information that is required should appear after the end of the layer data. From what is currently understood, the network name list is the preliminary block of data of interest ( essentially a direct sequence of tvw-string types with a prefixed count size ).

Preliminary Goal

A minimal working implementation will decode

• part names/position
• network names/position
• pin names/position and associated with the part and network

Where we are now

Currently we can decode manually;

• part name/position including package type and associated pin positions
• network names ( and possibly their direct index ID )
• pin positions and their indirect network ID

What we need still

• Pin ID <=:=> Network ID association map

Network names are easy enough to generate an array from

But tying them together with the 3-bit shifted pin ID (+8 for each pin) is something we need to work out still