Micro Jeep Model Kit Is Both Business Card And Portfolio

March 7, 2024 by 11 Comments

When finding work in product design and prototyping, two things are important to have at hand: a business card, and a sample of one’s work. If one can combine those, even better. Make it unique and eye-catching, and you’re really onto something. That seems to  have been the idea behind [agepbiz]’s 1:64 scale micro Jeep model kit that serves as an  “overcomplicated” business card.

Complete with box and labels in a shrink-wrapped package.

At its heart, the kit is a little print-in-place model kit that looks a lot like larger injection-molded model kits. Completing it is a custom-made box with custom labels, and it’s even shrink-wrapped. The whole thing fits easily in the palm of a hand.

There’s a lot of different tools effectively used to make the whole thing. The model card itself is 3D printed in multiple filament colors, and the box is constructed from carefully glued cardstock. The labels are custom printed, and a craft cutter (which has multiple uses for a hobbyist) takes care of all the precise cutting. It’s an awfully slick presentation, and the contents do not disappoint.

Get a closer look in the video, embedded just below. And if you like what you see, you’re in luck because we’ve seen [agepbiz]’s work before in this mini jet fighter, complete with blister pack.

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Blinky Business Card Plays Snake And Connect Four

January 16, 2023 by 6 Comments

There’s no better way to introduce yourself than handing over a blinky PCB business card and challenging the recipient to a game of Connect Four. And if [Dennis Kaandorp] turns up early for a meeting, he can keep himself busy playing the ever popular game of Snake on his PCB business card.

The tabs are 19 mm long and 4 mm wide.
The tabs are 19 mm long and 4 mm wide.

Quite wisely, [Dennis] kept his design simple, and avoided the temptation of feature creep. His requirements were to create a minimalist, credit card sized design, with his contact details printed on the silk legend, and some blinky LED’s.

The tallest component on such a design is usually the battery holder, and he could not find one that was low-profile and cheap. Drawing inspiration from The Art of Blinky Business Cards, he used the 0.8 mm thin PCB itself as the battery holder by means of flexible arms.

Connect-Four is a two player game similar to tic-tac-toe, but played on a grid seven columns across and six rows high. This meant using 42 dual-colour LED’s, which would require a large number of GPIO pins on the micro-controller. Using a clever combination of matrix and charlieplexing techniques, he was able to reduce the GPIO count down to 13 pins, while still managing to keep the track layout simple.

It also took him some extra effort to locate dual colour, red / green LED’s with a sufficiently low forward voltage drop that could work off the reduced output resulting from the use of charlieplexing. At the heart of the business card is an ATtiny1616 micro-controller that offers enough GPIO pins for the LED matrix as well as the four push button switches.

His first batch of prototypes have given him a good insight on the pricing and revealed several deficiencies that he can improve upon the next time around. [Dennis] has shared KiCad schematic and PCB layout files for anyone looking to get inspired to design their own PCB business cards.

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Minimal Tic Tac Toe Business Card

September 24, 2022 by 38 Comments

The PCB business card has long been a way for the aspiring electronics engineer to set themself apart from their peers. Handing out a card that is also a two player game is a great way to secure a couple minutes of a recruiter’s time, so [Ryan Chan] designed a business card that, in addition to his contact information, also has a complete Tic-Tac-Toe game built in.

[Ryan] decided that an OLED display was too expensive for something to hand out and an LED matrix too thick, so he decided to keep it simple and use an array of 18 LEDs—9 in each of two colors laid out in a familiar 3×3 grid. An ATmega328p running the Arduino bootloader serves as the brains of the operation. To achieve a truly minimal design [Ryan] uses a single SMD pushbutton for control: a short press moves your selection, a longer press finalizes your move, and a several-second press switches the game to a single-player mode, complete with AI.

If you’d like to design a Tic-Tac-Toe business card for yourself, [Ryan] was kind enough to upload the schematics and code for his card. If you’re still pondering what kind of PCB business card best represents you, it’s worth checking out cards with an updatable ePaper display or a tiny Tetris game.

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A Linux Business Card You Can Build

July 14, 2022 by 22 Comments

It is a sign of the times that one of [Dmitry’s] design criteria for his new Linux on a business card is to use parts you can actually find during the current component shortage. The resulting board uses a ATSAMD21 chip and emulates a MIPS machine in order to boot Linux.

We like that in addition to the build details, [Dmitry] outlines a lot of the reasons for his decisions. There’s also a a fair amount of detail about how the whole system actually works. For example, by using a 0.8 mm PCB, the board can accept a USB-C cable with no additional connector. There is also a great explanation of the MIPS MMU and don’t forget that MIPS begat RISC-V, so many of the MIPS core details will apply to RISC-V as well (but not the MMU).  You’ll also find some critiques of the ATSAMD21’s DMA system. It seems to save chip real estate, the DMA system stores configuration data in user memory which it has to load and unload every time you switch channels.

By the end of the post you get the feeling this may be [Dimitry]’s last ATSAMD21 project. But we have to admit, it seems to have come out great. This isn’t the first business card Linux build we’ve seen. This one sure reminded us of a MIDI controller card we once saw.

Laser-Cut Solder Masks From Business Cards

April 9, 2021 by 22 Comments

There are plenty of ways to make printed circuit boards at home but for some features it’s still best to go to a board shop. Those features continue to decrease in number, but not a lot of people can build things such as a four-layer board at home. Adding a solder mask might be one of those features for some, but if you happen to have a laser cutter and a few business cards sitting around then this process is within reach of the home builder too.

[Jeremy Cook] is lucky enough to have a laser cutter around, and he had an idea to use it to help improve his surface mount soldering process. By cutting the solder mask layer into a business card with the laser cutter, it can be held on top of a PCB and then used as a stencil to add the solder paste more easily than could otherwise be done. It dramatically decreases the amount of time spent on this part of the process, especially when multiple boards are involved since the stencil can be used multiple times.

While a laser cutter certainly isn’t a strict requirement, it certainly does help over something like an X-acto knife. [Jeremy] also notes that this process is sometimes done with transparency film or even Kapton, which we have seen a few times before as well.

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Arduino Takes Control Of Dead Business Card Cutter

September 10, 2020 by 13 Comments

It’s a common enough situation, that when an older piece of equipment dies, and nobody wants to spend the money to repair it. Why fix the old one, when the newer version with all the latest bells and whistles isn’t much more expensive? We all understand the decision from a business standpoint, but as hackers, it always feels a bit wrong.

Which is exactly why [tommycoolman] decided to rebuild the office’s recently deceased Duplo CC-330 heavy duty business card cutter. It sounds like nobody really knows what happened to the machine in the first place, but since the majority of the internals were cooked, some kind of power surge seems likely. Whatever the reason, almost none of the original electronics were reused. From the buttons on the front panel to the motor drivers, everything has been implemented from scratch.

An Arduino Mega 2560 clone is used to control four TB6600 stepper motor drivers, with a common OLED display module installed where the original display went. The keypad next to the screen has been replaced with 10 arcade-style buttons soldered to a scrap of perfboard, though in the end [tommycoolman] covers them with a very professional looking printed vinyl sheet. There’s also a 24 V power supply onboard, with the expected assortment of step up and step down converters necessary to feed the various electronics their intended voltages.

In the end, [tommycoolman] estimates it took about $200 and 30 hours of work to get the card cutter up and running again. The argument could be made that the value of his time needs to be factored into the repair bill as well, but even still, it sounds like a bargain to us; these machines have a four-figure price tag on them when new.

Stories like this one are important reminders of the all wondrous things you can find hiding in the trash. Any time a machine like this can be rescued from the junkyard, it’s an accomplishment worthy of praise in our book.

Blister Pack With Jet Fighter Toy Is A Business Card

March 5, 2020 by 20 Comments

In the world of business cards, it seems that for some people a white rectangle of card just doesn’t cut it any more. A card isn’t simply a means to display your contact details, instead it can be a way to show off your work and demonstrate to the world your capabilities. For [agepbiz] those are the skills of a 3D design specialist, so what better way to proceed than by distributing a 3D-printed example of his work? How to render that into a business card? Put it in a retail-style blister pack, of course. Take a look at the video below the break.

It’s an interesting process to follow, because  there are certainly readers who will have toyed with the idea of selling their work, and this makes an attractive way to display a small assembly while still keeping it safe from damage. The toy – a small 3D-printed jet fighter with working swing wings that’s a masterpiece in itself – is laid on a backing card and a custom blister is glued over it. The manufacture of the printed backing card with a CNC card cutter is shown, followed by that of the blister with a custom SLA-printed mould being used to vacuum-form a sheet of clear plastic. Surprisingly the whole is assembled with just a glue stick, we’d have expected something with a bit more grab. The result is a professional-looking blister packed product of the type you wouldn’t bat an eyelid over if you saw it in a shop, and one of those things that it’s very useful to have some insight into how one might be made..

It’s possible this card might be a little bulky to slip in your wallet, but it’s hardly the only novelty card we’ve brought you over the years. Some of our most recent favourites run Linux or play Tetris.

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