Upcycling Your Spare PCBs Before You Print Them

This instructable is merely meant to suggest an idea I have developed to reduce waste when I prototype boards. If you are like me, you go through quite a few rounds of a board, often they contain deal-breaker type bugs that make them wasteful to even assemble the remaining portions of. I find PCBs aesthetic objects in addition to their function and have begun to embrace the remaining boards as an artistic canvas to add value to the PCBs when they have no functional value. These boards don't fully work, but they were part of a series of Hackers (1995) themed boards I played around with.

Step 1: You Can Impress People You Like!

I post stuff like this tagging relevant people, and they usually love it. I recommend trying it.

*Aphex Twin and Alberto Daniel Hill, both indirectly or directly approved by owners of those images....make sure you don't get sued or alienate a good friend when doing this...GET PERMISSION!

Step 2: It's a Beautiful Medium, Explore It!

Not all aesthetic PCB work needs to be cultural, sometimes you can enhance the intrinsic beauty of the circuitry.

Step 3: Treat the Iterations of Your Project Like a Collectible Series

I treat the various busted prototypes I end up with as being part of an aesthetic group, so they tend to go with themes. I did many more for the other characters in this movie, including my personal media icons Razor and Blade. You can give these away as premiums to your customers later, and they will think you are even cooler than you already are. I am especially pleased that Acid Burns board is a shield for a RasPi, so Burn will be talking to an ARM(RISC) processor....Assuming she was functional... I think I screwed up the pins on the MIDI connectors on that one...chirality!

Step 4: Make Jokes for the Kind Chinese Workers That Make Your Boards

People are on the other side of the ocean doing very cool things for you for a reasonable price. Thank them! In this case, I don't think Ms. Bao is any more than a default name on my packing slip, but I entertained myself endlessly, imagining someone at the board house caught the joke.

Step 5: Offer It As an Artistic Medium to Visual Artists

A friend of mine Birdcap, who also happens to be one of my favorite visual artists (his work), gave me carte blanche permission to put his work on my boards. His work is often in unusual mediums and I thought it would work well in this one. It did! Remember, every layer is a "color" in your palette. Explore it!

Step 6: Enter Artistic Shows With It

Be as cool as people who have been studying art their whole life simply by being original. I personally enjoyed standing around this piece listening to people wonder how I got the lights to move out loud while I pretended to be just another attendee, and when someone got curious enough I would talk to them about it and then randomly say "let's find out" and pull it apart in front of them to show the inner workings. It was very satisfying as that was literally the only reason I made it.