Usually the business card itself is the reminder to get in contact with whoever gave it to you. But this is Hackaday, after all. This solar-powered card reminds the recipient to send [Dead Rat Productions] an email by beeping about every two hours, although the gist of that email may simply be begging them to make it stop, provided they didn’t just toss the thing in the garbage.
The full-on, working version of the card is not intended for everyone — mostly serious-looking A-list types that ooze wealth. Most of [Dead Rat Productions]’ pub mates will get an unpopulated version, which could be a fun afternoon for the right kind of recipient, of course.
That person would need a Seeed Studio Xiao SAMD21, a solar panel, plus some other components, like an energy-harvesting chip to keep the battery topped up. Of note, there is a coin cell holder that requires prying with a screwdriver to get the battery out, so there’s really no escaping the beeping without some work on their part. We rather like the artwork on this one, especially the fact that the coin cell sits inside the rat’s stomach. That’s a nice touch.
So … a solar charged annoyatron where the PCB is only populated if they think the recipient is a billionaire?
No actual website — just a pic from the card.
Historically, I may have been looking for clients in the completely wrong way.
They’d probably dodge a bullet by not having to work for you.
yup
Here is your participation award snowflake.
What’s wrong with it? It’s not pretentious – it just does one simply job efficiently. Seems like good, if somewhat simple, EE design to me. Artwork is also nice with a light hearted comical twist which implies they’d probs be easy to work with.
>efficiently
LOL. Huge LOL.
Firstly if you take the effort to design a business card which is supposed to show how unique/knowledgeable you are then:
Don’t use ready made modules. Search for the “i made this” image.
ESP32 to blink a sound a buzzer? Seriously? Also a module.
And I bet (I have not checked) its arduino based. Baby’s first project. I have standards.
Make it thin…
And the basic concept of energy harvesting is stupid too. If it consumes ~2uA on average, when will that battery deplete? Many years.
Also cost. Anywhere where the product is not a one off thing cost matters.
If the guy want’s to do this properly, grab a low power mcu (something like a pic10f), ditch the solar cell, timer circuit, pick a battery which is as thin as the pcb and spot weld a nickel to both sides + solder to the pcb flat. Inlay the mcu + buzzer in the pcb too.
This will show that at least he considered something form, function, cost. Not just “let’s hack together something to annoy people”.
There was a few articles here about bushiness cards already, for example the one running linux: impressive. The mini synth is awesome too. Or the one acting as an usb keyboard which types the info to a notepad when capslock or something is pressed 3 times is awesome too. All of them are great from all design aspects.
Looking into the circuit details a bit more carefully, I can see a neatly laid out low power timer circuit, an energy harvesting module, MCU, solar panel and beeper circuit. The timer circuit turns the MCU on and off, keeping the whole thing low power …. if indeed it works! There’s a couple of CMOS gates in the timer circuit, but not sure what these do.