A couple weeks ago I was fixing an old cassette deck - a Toshiba KT403, made in 1972.
As with most repairs, I started by opening it and seeing whether something obvious had gone wrong. While poking around, I saw this interesting looking circuit board.
Later on, while looking through the repair booklet, I found a diagram of that PCB.
What a beauty! it looks like a biological organism! I remember seeing older PCBs that look like this, and they always looked super cool. After looking into it, I found that in the pre-PC era, circuit board layouts were done by hand using adhesive tape on a clear film.
Naturally, I had to vectorize that PCB, not for any particular reason, just to do it. Maybe print it out on a shirt or something.
Okay, let's try image tracing the diagram in Illustrator.
No luck. Even pre-processed to bump the contrast, and AI upscaled to ridiculous sizes, it still is too rough, and the components are messing up the tracing.
Hmm, okay - time to go manual. Let's print it out and literally trace it by hand. Not sure if this is the best way, but there's only one way to see - I print it out at like 4x the real size and 3-4 hours of very satisfying menial labor later, we have it traced!
Now let's try the image trace in Illustrator again, and see if it's better.
Well... it's different. Looks like an H.R. Giger sketch. But not what I'm looking for.
I know what's the solution! Let's spend 4-5 hours more to manually warp and simplify each curve until it looks perfect.
Yeah that's more like it :)
At this point I'm happy with it and stop fiddling, let me just make a few variations and it can go on my desktop background.
If anyone really wants, here's an .svg file with the final graphic. I guess you could go and actually make a working control board for a Toshiba KT403. Or a cool t-shirt.
