Facing the horrifying realization that he’s going to graduate soon, EE student [Colin Jackson] AKA [Electronics Guy] needed a business card. Not just any business card: a PCB business card. Not just any PCB business card: a PCB business card that can play pong.
[Colin] was heavily inspired by the card [Ben Eater] was handing out at OpenSauce last year, and openly admits to copying the button holder from it. We can’t blame him: the routed-out fingers to hold a lithium button cell were a great idea. The original idea, a 3D persistence-of-vision display, was a little too ambitious to fit on a business card, so [Colin] repurposed the 64 LED matrix and STM32 processor to play Pong. Aside from the LEDs and the microprocessor, it looks like the board has a shift register to handle all those outputs and a pair of surface-mount buttons.
Of course you can’t get two players on a business card, so the microprocessor is serving as the opponent. With only 64 LEDs, there’s no room for score-keeping — but apparently even the first, nonworking prototype was good enough to get [Colin] a job, so not only can we not complain, we offer our congratulations.
The video is a bit short on detail, but [Colin] promises a PCB-business card tutorial at a later date. If you can’t wait for that, or just want to see other hackers take on the same idea, take a gander at some of the entries to last year’s Business Card Challenge.
Without making it open-source for others to replicate it’s just pure, facebook-grade vanity. I’m not interested in your skills, I want to open a github and have a fun hardware project to hack with.
This might be a stretch but what if the purpose of such a business card is to show prospective employers or clients your skills?
It is open source: https://github.com/Blender-Guy1/Business_Card
(I’m Colin). I’m slowly working on a boring tutorial on how to edit this PCB for non-EE people. I haven’t uploaded the code to the GitHub yet (because I forgot). But you’ll probably want to reprogram it yourself because my code is awful.
Nice work mate. I am doing my own card that is a different design and am keen to know how your battery setup works. It is hard to know what is a good amount of pcb to leave in vs being too stiff or the battery falling out.
It’s good to see what others are doing, regardless of making it open-source.
Making it open-source is a great bonus, though.
Thank you.
I’m sweating with envy!
What about the costs?
I would not like to invest too much, just to impress random people.
It got him a job. And working out the costs is not hard. It’s a good skill to learn if you want to be an engineer.
I’m Colin, the guy in the video. I think I spent like $120 overall. That includes all of the prototypes and electronics (not including time spent). If I were to make it again, I could make 10 new PCB Business Cards for like $25. It’s definitely not cheap and I spend a lot of time soldering because I don’t have the greatest soldering setup. Also, I will spend a lot of money to impress random people. I am not a very socially smart person.
Whine, whine, whine, grumble, complain.
Just another day at HaD.
the 4th word in isaiah 5:14 of KJV, is “enlarged”.