FOR e-waste & ITAD operators

Mixed scrap sells by the pound. Identified parts sell by the part.

Your board pile sells for pennies a kilo. The same boards, with the handful of valuable chips found, identified and cut out, sell for dollars each. Unmake builds a machine that goes on your floor and does the finding — the part that takes a person all day.

Get a quote See it on real boards

TAKES BOARDS UP TO: 600 × 500 mm
CUT ACCURACY: ± 0.05 mm
OPERATOR: 1, no training

CAM 01 TELECOM LINE CARD LIVE · 8.97 px/mm

X 000.0 · Y 000.0 mm

19/ 19 chips found

10 mm

worth recovering cover — look underneath real boards · real part numbers · move your cursor over the board

$8.00per chip, identifiedwhat a manual vendor pays today

61/65valuable chips foundacross 12 real boards

90/hrchips cut per hourvs 12–20 by hand

1operator, no trainingload a board, press go

01PROBLEM

The value walks out the door mixed together.

A recycler processes laptops, servers, printers and phones by the tonne. Boards leave as one commodity stream, priced by weight. But a handful of parts on each board are worth tens of times the rest — and nobody has time to find them.

Discarded circuit boards weathering in grass, components still attached. — **INBOUND** mixed board scrap — every one carries per-unit-priced silicon

MIXED BOARD SCRAPpennies / kg

GOLD-LEG ICs, SORTED BY WEIGHT$17.50 / lb

IDENTIFIED, BY PART NUMBER$7–8 / chip

COMPLETED SALES

PMC PM5384	lot of 126	$1,008	$8.00/ea
Microsemi PM8004C	lot of 181	$1,299.99	$7.18/ea

The whole value of the machine is identification and sorting.
The cutting is the easy half.

02PROOF

Run on 12 real boards. Here is what it found.

No two boards in your pile are the same, so we tested on the mess: telecom line cards, consoles, DVR boards, alarm panels. Every board was hand-checked first so we know exactly what the machine missed. Those numbers are below, including the bad ones.

Detector output on a telecom line card: chips boxed with part numbers read. — **TELECOM LINE CARD** 17 of 19 found · part numbers read off the chips

Detector output on an Xbox One motherboard, chips boxed and labelled. — **XBOX ONE** 18 of 19 found · 1 false alarm

Detector output on a DVR video board. — **DVR VIDEO BOARD** 9 of 9 found · 0 false alarms · 6 covers flagged

Detector output on a Sony PS5 motherboard. — **PS5 MAIN BOARD** 5 of 8 found · dense and shielded, the hardest kind

01 / 04

12 boards · hand-checked first65 chips worth money · 61 found

BOARD	BIG CHIPS ON IT	FOUND	FALSE ALARMS
Telecom line card (SFP, T1/E1)	19	19	20
Telecom line card (PMC framers)	19	17	10
Xbox One console board	19	18	1
DVR / video processing board	9	9	0
Alarm / fire panel	10	6	1
PS5 console board	8	5	0
Telecom card, chip under heatsink	4	0	2
chips actually worth money, all 12 boards	65	61	—

> the bottom row is the one that matters: of 65 chips worth real money across 12 boards, it found 61. The honest failure is row seven — a telecom card whose main processor sits under a heatsink. It found nothing, because it cannot see through metal. It now flags covers for a human to lift, and that is the kind of thing we would rather you saw here than discovered after buying one.

TODAY

By hand

A person finds and pulls 12–20 chips an hour, if you can spare the person. Most operators can't, so the boards go out mixed.

WITH A CELL

90 an hour

One operator loads boards. The machine finds, prices and cuts. Same person can run other work between loads.

PER SHIFT

~700 chips

An 8-hour shift on dense boards. At $8 a chip that is material you are currently selling by weight.

THE CATCH

Board mix decides it

Telecom and server boards pay. Consumer boards mostly don't. We tell you which yours are before you spend anything.

03MACHINE

Find it, price it, cut it, log it.

A rigid three-axis gantry on linear rails with a cutting spindle, a camera overhead, and a sealed cabinet around it. It sits on a bench and plugs into a normal wall socket.

THE CONFIGURATION a six-axis arm in a guarded cell — stock footage of the hardware class, not our machine

Board in

Drop the board on the plate against two stops. Any size, any make, no setup and nothing to program.

Find & read

A camera finds every chip on the board, measures it, and reads the part number printed on top.

Price it

Each chip is priced against your buyer's list. If it will not pay for its own cycle time it stays on the board.

Cut & log

Parts come off sorted by part number, not mixed in a bin, with a per-board log and photos you can hand a buyer.

PRECISION the same motion class that builds boards, run in reverse

ENCLOSED interlocked guarding, extraction at the cut

04RUNNING IT

What it takes on your floor.

The questions every operator asks before anything else. If any answer here is a problem for your site, tell us now rather than after a pilot.

FOOTPRINT

~1 × 0.8 m

Gantry ships in a 955 × 760 mm crate at 60 kg. Sits on a bench; the enclosure adds a little. No pit, no anchor.

WORK AREA

600 × 500 mm

Big enough for a full server or telecom board in one pass. ±0.05 mm positioning on linear rails. Runs from a standard wall socket.

OPERATOR

1 · untrained

Load a board, press go, empty the tray. Anyone on your floor can run it.

DUST & FUMES

Extracted at the cut

Sealed cabinet, HEPA extraction. FR4 dust and leaded solder never leave the enclosure.

SAFETY

Interlocked

Door interlock and e-stop. Cutting cannot start with the cabinet open.

RECORDS

Per-board log

Every board and part logged with images — the paper trail your R2 or RIOS auditor asks for.

Who buys the chips?

Obsolete-parts brokers who price by part number. If you already sell to one, the machine feeds your existing buyer. If you don't, we introduce you — sorted, identified parts are the only kind they want.

What happens to the rest of the board?

It goes out on your normal scrap stream. Only parts that pay for their own cycle time come off; everything else stays where it is.

Does it handle data-bearing parts?

No. The machine touches loose boards after your data destruction step. It is not a data-sanitisation product and does not change your chain of custody.

What does it cost?

The first cell is going in with a design-partner recycler, so pricing is being set with them rather than off a list. Tell us your board volume and mix and we will give you a straight number and a payback estimate.

05STATUS

We are looking for the first site.

SHIPPED

Detector evaluated on 12 real boards, results published above in full
Ensemble method selected on measured F1, not on a demo
Toolpath generation from detected geometry
Gantry, 4K camera, cross-polarised lighting on the bench

IN FLIGHT

Hand-cut coupon test — ten chips, buyer pricing both formats
Cut quality and chip survival at 1.5 mm margin
Chips per hour on real boards, against the $8/chip human baseline
First cell for a multi-site ITAD customer

NOT YET

No production cell installed anywhere
No throughput number measured on a full board run
Coupon format unproven with a buyer — that test is the gate

If you run boards and want to put a box of them in front of the detector, that is exactly the conversation we want. We will tell you if the answer is "nothing here is worth recovering" — it is cheaper to learn that now.

REQ dallas–fort worth, texas

Send us a box of boards.

We run them through the detector and send back what it found, what it would recover, and what that is worth against your buyer's list. No charge for the first run.

Send a sample Talk about a pilot