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.

Continue reading “Blister Pack With Jet Fighter Toy Is A Business Card” →

Now Even Your Business Card Can Run Linux

December 24, 2019 by 50 Comments

It takes a lot of work to get a functional PCB business card that’s thin, cheap, and robust enough to be practical. If you can even blink a few LEDs on the thing and still hand them out with a straight face, you’ve done pretty well for yourself. So you can imagine our surprise when [George Hilliard] wrote in to tell us about his $3 business card computer that boots into a functioning Linux environment. If this were a bit closer to April, we might have figured it was just a joke…

Of course it helps that, as an embedded systems engineer, [George] literally does this kind of thing for a living. Which isn’t to say it was easy, but at least he keeps close enough tabs on the industry to find a suitable ARM solution at a price that makes sense, namely the Allwinner F1C100s. This diminutive chip offers both RAM and CPU in a single package, which greatly simplifies the overall design and construction of the card.

With a root filesystem that weighs in at just 2.4 MB, the environment on the card is minimal to say the least. There’s no networking, limited I/O, and forget about running any heavy software. But it does boot in about six seconds, and [George] managed to pack in a MicroPython interpreter and a copy of the classic Unix dungeon crawler rogue.

Oh yeah, and it also has his resume and some samples of his photography onboard. It is, after all, a business card. All the user has to do is plug it into the USB port of their computer and wait for the virtual serial port to pop up that will let them log into the system running on the card. It also shows up as a USB Mass Storage device for recipients who might not be quite as adept at the command line.

In addition to the high-level documentation for this project, [George] has also prepared a deeper write-up that goes into more technical detail for anyone who might be looking to follow in his footsteps. Thanks to all of the source code that he’s made available, it should be a lot easier for the next person to get their own disposable pocket computer up and running.

We’ve seen all manner of electronic business cards over the years, but never anything quite like this. Which, of course, is quite the point. If you’re ever given a business card that doubles as a computer running a full-fledged operating system on it, you aren’t likely to forget it anytime soon.

There’s More To Designing A PCB Business Card Than Meets The Eye

November 19, 2019 by 9 Comments

A curious custom that survives from the pre-computer era is that of the business card. If you walk the halls at a trade event you’ll come a way with a stack of these, each bearing the contact details of someone you’ve encountered, and each in a world of social media and online contact destined to languish in some dusty corner of your desk. In the 21st century, when electronic contacts harvested by a mobile phone have the sticking power, how can a piece of card with its roots in a bygone era hope to compete?

It’s a question [Anthony Kouttron] has addressed in the design of his thoroughly modern business card, and along the way he’s treated us to an interesting narrative on how to make the card both useful beyond mere contact details as well as delivering that electronic contact. The resulting card has an array of  rulers and footprints as an electronic designer’s aid, as well as an NFC antenna and chip that lights an LED and delivers his website address when scanned. There are some small compromises such as PCB pads under the NFC antenna, but as he explains in the video below, they aren’t enough to stop it working. He’s put his work in a GitHub repository, should you wish to do something similar.

There’s a rich vein of business card projects on these pages, but so far surprisingly few are NFC equipped. That didn’t stop someone from making an NFC-enabled card with user interaction though.

Continue reading “There’s More To Designing A PCB Business Card Than Meets The Eye” →

NFC Business Cards To FPGA Cubes, Skull Badges To Bandoliers, Here’s The Hardware From Breakfast At DEF CON

August 17, 2019 by 5 Comments

We had our biggest Breakfast at DEF CON ever on Sunday. So big, in fact, that the carefully laid plans went awry immediately.

This is the fifth year we’ve hosted the event, which kicks off the final day of DEF CON with some hardware show-and-tell. We really thought we had it all figured out, since this time we actually booked a space in Paris hotel. For the first three years we were just banditing the space — asking everyone to show up at this place and it’ll become an event. Last year we planned to have it in the Hardware Hacking Village, but the casino stopped us from bringing in pastries that morning and we ended up camping out in a dining area that wasn’t open until the afternoon.

Last weekend we had a cafe booked, with pastries and coffee on order. The only problem is that you are all too awesome. We had a couple hundred people show up and the cafe didn’t want us standing, which limited our space to the number of booth seats available. No worries, as is the tradition we spilled out into a lounge area on the casino floor and enjoyed ourselves!

Here’s some of the hardware that showed up at this gathering.

Continue reading “NFC Business Cards To FPGA Cubes, Skull Badges To Bandoliers, Here’s The Hardware From Breakfast At DEF CON” →

Tiny Sideways Tetris On A Business Card

May 20, 2018 by 14 Comments

Everyone recognizes Tetris, even when it’s tiny Tetris played sideways on a business card. [Michael Teeuw] designed these PCBs and they sport small OLED screens to display contact info. The Tetris game is actually a hidden easter egg; a long press on one of the buttons starts it up.

It turns out that getting a playable Tetris onto the ATtiny85 microcontroller was a challenge. Drawing lines and shapes is easy with resources like TinyOLED or Adafruit’s SSD1306 library, but to draw those realtime graphics onto the 128×32 OLED using that method requires a buffer size that wouldn’t fit the ATtiny85’s available RAM.

To solve this problem, [Michael] avoids the need for a screen buffer by calculating the data to be written to the OLED on the fly. In addition, the fact that the smallest possible element is a 4×4 pixel square reduces the overall memory needed to track the screen contents. As a result, the usual required chunk of memory to use as a screen buffer is avoided. [Michael] also detailed the PCB design and board assembly phases for those of you interested in the process of putting together the cards using a combination of hot air reflow and hand soldering.

PCB business cards showcase all kinds of cleverness. The Magic 8-Ball Business Card is refreshingly concise, and the project that became the Arduboy had milled cutouts to better fit components, keeping everything super slim.

Stylish Business Card With A Stylophone Built In

May 11, 2018 by 19 Comments

If you’re in the electronics business, PCB business cards seem like a natural fit. They may be impractical and expensive, but they can really set you apart from that boring paper card from Vistaprint crowd. But they need to make sense for what you do, so for a musician and MIDI pro, this MIDI-controller stylophone business card is a real eye- and ear-catcher.

This business card is an idea that [Mitxela] has been kicking around for a while, and he even built a prototype a couple of years ago. The homebrew card, made using the spray paint, laser etching, and ferric chloride method, worked well enough as a proof of concept, but it was a little rough around the edges and needed the professional touch of a PCB fabricator. We’ve got to say that the finished cards are pretty darn sexy, with the black resist contrasting nicely against the gold-immersion pads. He selected a 1-mm thick board and made the USB connector as a separate small board; snapped off of the main board and reflowed back on, it builds up the edge connector to the proper thickness. The parts count is low — just an ATtiny85 and a resistor ladder to encode each key, with a simple jumper used as the stylus. The device itself is just a MIDI controller and makes no music on its own, but we still think this is a pretty creative way to hang out a shingle.

[Mitxela] has quite a few interesting builds, and is no stranger to our pages. Check out his recent servo-plucked MIDI music box, or these amazing miniature LED earrings.

Continue reading “Stylish Business Card With A Stylophone Built In” →

Magic 8 Ball Business Card Will Answer All Your Questions

April 5, 2018 by 14 Comments

The PCB business card has long been a staple amongst the freelance EE set. It’s a way to show potential clients that you can do the job, as well as leave a great first impression. Some are simple blinkenlights devices, others have contact information on USB storage. We reckon that [Seamus] has really hit it out of the park with this one, though.

That’s right- this business card riffs on the classic Magic 8-ball toy. Ask a question, shake the card, and it’ll light an LED with the corresponding answer to your query. Use it as a desk toy, or break deadlocks in meetings by looking to the card for the correct course of action.

It’s a very tasteful build, showing off [Seamus]’s minimalist chops – consisting of just a decade counter, a tilt sensor, and some LEDs. When the card is shaken, the tilt sensor outputs a series of pulses to the clock line of the decade counter, whose outputs are the 8 LEDs. When the tilt sensor settles, it lands on the final answer.

We think it’s a great card, which shows off both fundamental technical skills as well as a certain flair and creativity which can be key to landing exciting projects. It doesn’t hurt that it’s good fun, to boot. For another take on the Magic 8-ball, check out this build that can give you a Yes/No answer on demand.