At the end of the month my contract with my current employer (no, not Hackaday) will end. With the interviews starting to line up I therefore thought it’d be a nice opportunity to design the PCB business card you can see in the picture above.
It is made of two PCBs soldered together, the bottom one containing the SMD components while the top one only has holes to let most of them pass through. The design was mainly inspired by the first version we already featured on Hackaday although the microcontroller was changed for the (costly) ATMega32u4 and the top PCB was slightly milled so the LEDs may shine through the FR4. The LEDs are connected in groups of 2 (total of 8 groups) to PWM channels and a hidden flash memory allows the card to be recognized as an external 2MB storage using the LUFA library. All source files may be downloaded on my website.
I tried something similar after i saw something like this on a hacked gadgets some years ago, after making 25 i quickly realized that government contractors and large companies are rather hesitant about plugging a random sketchy looking USB device into their computers connected to there networks thats filled with sensitive and proprietary information XP
something i always joke about at my interviews… though usually curiosity has the better of them
You mean “their” networks…
If this doesn’t get you a job, I don’t know what will. :)
thanks!
A nice improvement on v1. I’ve had my own version of a business card “on the backlog” for a while now and yours is a definite inspiration.
I was intending to use a single PCB and invert the ICs and LEDs – i.e. as if just using the top layer on yours. I’ve not got past the planning stage yet though and it keeps getting bumped for other projects.
I’ve got a couple of questions, but I’ll ask those over on your site rather than here.
great! or mathieu at hackaday….
Nice! Just be careful to make the USB port stick out enough to work directly with the jacks in laptops, etc. Most HR departments will not have a USB extension cable as you show in your picture.
Nor will most HR departments be permitted to plug unauthorized devices into the company’s computer systems. Especially the ones that handle payroll, benefits, and employee’s personal information. This is a very foolish security risk. Business card or not, I’d confiscate this as soon as i seen it and discipline the employee who was stupid enough to plug it in.
I ditto the “you can’t plug random USB doohickeys into work computers a lot of times. It’s a big, get your butt in A LOT of hot water, no-no where I work. No usb flash drives, nothing. But guys who whip out these kinds of business cards tend to be looking at more modern age, open, start-up, bring your dog and beer to work kinds of places that would encourage this type of stuff. But this is getting to be kind of old hat by now and I’m sure most of these places are well aware of DIY electronic usb business cards and have had many handed to them in interviews. I’d say it may even be a bit tacky by now, like the real thing has been for years.
I still think these look cool but could definitely be impractical depending on where you are trying to get a job.
I really need to get some new business cards but I don’t think I’ll get as innovative as this one.