Why I’m saving my resistor legs

If you’re trying to keep a clean circuit on a breadboard, you probably clip your resistor legs to avoid this unsightly scene:

Now, what do you do with the waste? At M5, we have e-waste bins at each Pi Room station for easily disposing of clipped resistor legs. However, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Well, maybe it’s not exactly my treasure, but it’s definitely something useful for my projects nonetheless.

Vias are drilled holes in PCBs (printed circuit boards) that connect one copper layer to another through the dielectric. When professional PCB fabricators make these, they usually electroplate the drilled channels to create a conductive path. If you’re fabricating PCBs at home with a CNC router, this method isn’t accessible. That’s where our resistor legs come in.

If we go into KiCad and place 0.6 mm diameter vias, we can simply insert resistor legs into the drilled holes and solder both sides to create a conductive path.

Here’s a schematic for a motor controller PCB that uses a Pi Pico for logic and includes some homemade vias:

Karl Kreuze

Electrical Engineering, 2026, Computer Engineering, 2026

9 March 2026