How to design a motherboard for your electronics project - Part 1 -1. Overview After the prototyping phase of any electronics project, I like to make a "Motherboard" PCB. For this phase I will continue to use breakout boards for all of the individual components, but link them together using a PCB. This allows the PCB design to stay simple and flexible, and makes them easy to hand manufacture them in my workshop. This is a great setup if you want to do a small (10ish) beta run of your project before designing a full product. I have shipped many hardware products using this stage, it's a great way to validate your MVP before putting money into tooling and CM bring up.