ProtoPCB: Reclaiming Printed Circuit Board E-waste as Prototyping Material
Jasmine Lu, Sai Rishitha Boddu, Pedro Alcântara Antunes Lopes · 2025
We propose an interactive tool that enables reusing printed circuit boards (PCB) as prototyping materials to implement new circuits—this extends the utility of PCBs rather than discards them as e-waste. To enable this, our tool takes a user's desired circuit schematic and analyzes its components and connections to find methods of creating the user's circuit on discarded PCBs (e.g., e-waste, old prototypes). In our technical evaluation, we utilized our tool across a diverse set of PCBs and input circuits to characterize how often circuits could be implemented on a different board, implemented with minor interventions (trace-cutting or bodge-wiring), or implemented on a combination of multiple boards—demonstrating how our tool assists with exhaustive matching tasks that a user would not likely perform manually. We believe our tool offers: (1) a new approach to prototyping with electronics beyond the limitations of breadboards and (2) a new approach to reducing e-waste during electronics prototyping.