There’s a moment every serious hardware engineer remembers. You’re hunched over a breadboard at 2 a.m., your Arduino Uno buried under a tower of stacked shields — a motor driver here, a Wi-Fi module there, an LCD shield on top — and the whole assembly looks like a Jenga tower that one wrong wire could collapse. It works, barely. But somewhere in the back of your mind, a question starts forming: there has to be a better way.

That question is the beginning of real hardware engineering.

The path from Arduino shields to custom PCB design isn’t just a technical progression. It’s a philosophical shift in how you think about electronics — from consumer to creator, from assembler to architect. Understanding this evolution doesn’t just make you a better engineer. It changes the way you see every piece of technology you touch.

Anyone who’s spent significant amounts of time salvaging old electronics has probably wished there were a way to take apart a circuit board without desoldering it. [Zeyu Yan] et al seem to have had the same thought, and so designed circuit boards that can be dissolved and recycled when they become obsolete.

The researchers printed the circuit boards out of water-soluble PVA, with hollow channels in place of interconnects. After printing the boards, they injected a eutectic gallium-indium liquid metal alloy into these channels, populated the boards with components, making sure that their leads were in contact with the liquid alloy, and finally closed off the channels with PVA glue, which also held the components in place. When the board is ready to recycle, they simply dissolve the board and glue in water. The electric components tend to separate easily from the liquid alloy, and both can be recovered and reused. Even the PVA can be reused: the researchers evaporated the solution left after dissolving a board, broke up the remaining PVA, and extruded it as new filament.

The researchers designed a FreeCAD plugin to turn single or multi-layer KiCad circuit layouts into printable files. They had to design a few special sockets to hold components in place, since no solder will be fastening them, but it does support both SMD and through-hole components.

DissolvPCB: Fully Recyclable 3D-Printed Electronics with Liquid Metal Conductors and PVA Substrates
https://smartlab.cs.umd.edu/assets/pdf/dissolvpcb.pdf

Many engineers graduate from their studies and head out into the workforce, seeking a paycheck and a project at some existing company or other. Often, it’s not long before an experienced engineer begins to contemplate striking out on their own, working as a skilled gun-for-hire that makes their own money and their own hours.

Things were on the up for Dave, right until the redundancy train came around once again. The inconvenience, combined with a lack of jobs in his field in the UK, pushed him to consider a major lifestyle change. He’d strike out on his own.
Early on in his consulting and prototyping career, Dave found himself type cast as “the PCB guy.”

At this time, he explains how he tangled with the many challenges involved in working for one’s self. Not least of which, the difficulty of actually establishing a functional business in the UK, from bureaucratic red tape to handling the necessary marketing and financials.

He found his first jobs by working with so-called “innovation companies”—which provide services to those looking for design help to bring their ideas to life. These companies generally lacked engineering staff, so Dave’s services proved valuable to this specific market. It provided Dave some income, but came with a problem. After several years, he realized he had no public portfolio of work, because everything he’d worked on was under a non-disclosure agreement of some form or other.

Eventually, he realized he’d ended up in a “box.” He’d become “the PCB guy,” finding his work stagnating despite having such a broad and underexploited skillset. This didn’t sit right, and it was time for change once again. “I’m just thinking I don’t want to be a PCB guy,” Dave explains. “I want to do it all.” Thus was born his push into new fields. He built an arcade machine, art installations, and kept working to push himself out of his comfort zone.

Eventually, something exciting came down the line that really inspired him. “Some guys wanted me to build something, and it was totally oddball,” he says. “They wanted me to put an airbag in a basketball shoe.” The concept was simple enough—the airbag was intended to deploy to protect the wearer if excessive ankle roll was detected. Building the shoe in real life would be the perfect opportunity for him to stretch his abilities.

The rest of Dave’s talk covers how the project came to break him out of his design funk, and how he’s tackling the difficult engineering problems involved. Even more joyously, he’s able to talk openly about it since there’s no NDA involved. He compares plans to use pyrotechnic devices versus stored gas systems, tears down commercial shoes for research, and even his journey into the world of scanning feet and making his own force sensors. As much as he was leveraging his existing skill base, he’s also been expanding it rapidly to meet the new challenges of a truly wild shoe project.

Dave’s talk is an inspiring walk through how he developed a compelling and satisfying engineering career without just going by the book.

A short review on my experience using Seeed’s PCB service.

https://hackaday.io/project/185901-seeed-fusion-pcb-pcba-review