When we talk about badges and printed circuit boards, it is usually in the context of the infinite creativity of the Badgelife scene, our community’s own art form of electronic conference badges. It’s easy to forget when homing in on those badges that there are other types of badge, and thus [Saimon]’s PCB badge holder is an entertaining deviation from our norm. His workplace requires employees to carry their credit-card-sized ID pass with them at all times, but the plastic holder that came with his had broken. So he did what any self-respecting engineer would do, and designed his own holder using PCBs.
It’s a three-way sandwich with identical front and back PCBs featuring a nice design, but the clever bit is the middle PCB. It is U-shaped to slide the card in from the side, but to retain the card it has a couple of springy milled PCB arms each with a small retaining tooth on the end. This is an ingenious solution, with just enough give to bend, but not so much as to break.
The three boards are glued together, it seems his original aim was to reflow solder them but this was not successful. The result is an attractive and functional badge holder, which if Hackaday required us to have a corporate ID you can be sure we’d be eyeing up for ourselves.
So because I wasn’t quite clear on this:
“The trace are invented, so the PCB it’s not functional… no fancy blinking LED….”
It’s a pretty holder made from PCB, but it’s not functional beyond being a functional card holder. It looks gorgeous though.
Okay, it took me a moment to realize it is open frame, so my rfid/nfc badge could work in one.
I have tested with NFC and RFID cards, both works!
Id buy one if it didnt say PCB Badge Holder
That is very cool! However, I’d recommend putting a small break in the conductive loop of copper surrounding the rectangular cutout in the outer boards. The closed loop will act as a shorted secondary coil to RFID card readers and will absorb some of the RF field, reducing the amount of energy that reaches the card. 125KHz cards would probably work fine with it, but the common HF cards (like MIFARE and iClass) are going to see a drop in read range.
What it needs is another RFID coil to suck some power to illuminate a few LEDs around the edge