Landline phone PCBs and PWAs help please!

[var10]

Hi

I am a mechanical engineer who has some interest in learning about boards and its schematics. Any guidance and help will be very much appreciated. I am looking at starting from a landline phone pwas. What they have? Where to buy? are they all mostly generic in what components goes on them? some online research I did shows me that all manufacturers dont tell whats on the board except for few details and that is fair enough. Please go easy on me!

Basically need advice with softwares that I can use for board layout and design, where to start my research, where to buy cheap pcbs that are used in renowned phones like cisco and nec etc. How to get the schematics of exisiting boards.

Cheers,

V.

 

[MikeHalloran]

You can probably find a bunch of landline phones in any landfill.
If you want to find out how they work, you probably won't be able to make sense of them, given integrated circuits.
Even really old Western Electric stuff without fancy electronics can be difficult to figure out because of the fancy magnetics.
I.e., even early phones were more complicated than you might imagine; you might start with something else.

You might be better off to disassemble an assortment of cheap consumer electronics of all kinds and do some comparative anatomy. For your purposes it probably doesn't matter whether they work or not.

Military and high-tech electronics tend to have multilayer boards and/or surface mount components that can be very difficult to comprehend even with documentation.

The real pinnacle of board manufacture is consumer televisions with single sided boards, which started appearing a couple decades ago. Lots of them in landfills.





Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[mcgyvr]

Typically when one wants to learn something you start with the basics and work your way up..
Attempting to jump right in the middle is never a good plan and usually ends up with frustration which will cause you to quickly loose interest and just give up.
You will never be able to figure out whats going on if you don't know the basics..

Heck most "Cisco",etc.. type phones are little more than a power stage/microprocessor/display/buttons and you aren't going to know whats happening there as its all mostly software (firmware).
If you are interested in starting with the basics there then I might suggest looking into an Arduino.. TONS of info/projects/schematics/code examples out there to get you started..

---
There are numerous PCB schematic/layout software packages out there..
I use "Diptrace" (both personally and professionally) as I find it to be an easy to learn but powerful/capable package that is available in a "free" version.

Altium/PADS/Mentor Graphics/Orcad,etc... are used by many in the professional world.