Why I’m saving my resistor legs

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

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

Vias are drilled holes in PCBs (printed circuit boards), that connect one copper layer to another copper layer through the dielectric. When professional PCB fabricators do this, they usually electroplate the channel that has been drilled out to provide the conductive path. If you’re doing homemade PCB fabrication with a CNC router, this fabrication method is inaccessible. Instead, this is where our resistor legs come in. If we go into KiCad and place down some 0.6mm diameter vias, we can simply plug these drilled holes with resistor legs, and solder both sides to provide the conductive path!

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

Karl Kreuze

Electrical Engineering, 2026, Computer Engineering, 2026

9 March 2026