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.

A Simple POV Business Card

March 9, 2018 by 28 Comments

The business card is an odd survivor from the past, when you think about it. When a salesman in a Mad Men style suit stepped out of his Studebaker and walked past a room full of typists to the boss’s wood-paneled office, he would have handed over a card as a matter of course. It would get filed away in the Rolodex.

These days, making your card stand out from the crowd of print-shop specials has become an art form. In our community this extends to cards with integrated electronics, such as this one with a persistence-of-vision display driven by an ATtiny from [James Cochrane], shown in the video below.  It’s by no means the first such card, but he takes us through its design and construction in great detail which makes the video below the break worth a look. If you have never made a toner transfer PCB for example, you can see how his was made.

He makes the point that while a POV spinner needs only to display in one direction, a card has to be waved back and forth. Thus it needs to change the direction of its display, and needs a tilt sensor to activate this. His construction method uses through-hole components, but is surface mount in that they are soldered to the top surface of the board. The result is a rather attractive POV card that maybe isn’t something you’d hand out to all and sundry, but perhaps that’s not the point.

Continue reading “A Simple POV Business Card” →

NFC Enabled Business Card

October 25, 2017 by 24 Comments

[Sjaak] is back at it again with the cool PCB business cards, this time alleviating the burden to physically type his contact information into your phone. But NFC isn’t the only cool thing on this PCB – as always, his aesthetics don’t disappoint.

When we see [Sjaak’s] card, the future seems to be the now – not only do we have business cards that can take our pulse, we have business cards that actively help facilitate the exchange of contact information. I know what you’re thinking. “Business cards made of paper do that already.” That’s true if you read them. You have to physically remember you have the card (aka not put it through the wash), and, if you’re like most folks, you’ll ultimately enter the information into your cell phone’s contact list. Why not skip the whole reading thing? You know, just zap your contact information into the contact list of people automatically?

Maybe this is exactly what [Sjaak] thought when he built his NFC enabled business card. Maybe not. Regardless, [Sjaak’s] card is beautiful – both in implementation and aesthetics. Powered by “a nice little NFC EEPROM from NXP”, (the NT3H1101) the business card even has an energy harvesting mode. Moreover, one can interact with the card via four buttons and an LED. The LED informs the user what mode the card is currently in, and the buttons choose which URL is sent to users via NFC. To add icing to the cake, the back of the PCB is decked out via [Sjaak’s] custom full-color decal process we covered back in August.

As great as it looks, the card still needs some improvement. “I still need to tackle the sharp and protruding components on the front, which will ruin your wallet.” But, in our eyes, the card is surely on its way to greatness, and we look forward to seeing its final form. However, if you’re anything like us, you might want to see some other rad PCB business cards while you wait. If that’s the case, we recommend this logic based finite machine and this card made by a hackaday author.

The Art Of Blinky Business Cards

October 4, 2017 by 42 Comments

Business cards are stuck somewhere between antiquity and convenience. On one hand, we have very convenient paperless solutions for contact swapping including Bluetooth, NFC, and just saying, “Hey, put your number into my phone, please.” On the other hand, holding something from another person is a more personal and memorable exchange. I would liken this to the difference between an eBook and a paperback. One is supremely convenient while the other is tactile. There’s a reason business cards have survived longer than the Rolodex.

Protocols and culture surrounding the exchange of cards are meant to make yourself memorable and a card which is easy to associate with you can work long after you’ve given your card away. This may seem moot if you are assigned cards when you start a new job, but personal business cards are invaluable for meeting people outside of work and you are the one to decide how wild or creative to make them.

Continue reading “The Art Of Blinky Business Cards” →

Use All That Extra Space With PCB Panelization

July 4, 2017 by 17 Comments

Anyone who’s made a PCB has encountered the conundrum of having to pay for space that you don’t use… for instance, designing a round PCB and seeing the corners go to waste. The solution? Smaller boards added to the blank spots.

One logical stumbling block might be that you simply don’t have a small PCB design ready to go. Latvian hacker [Arsenijs] created a resource of small PCBs that can be dropped into those blank spots, as well as a tutorial on how to combine the gerbers into a single panel.

Great minds think alike, and this guide is following hot on the heels of [Brian Benchoff’s] article on panelization. They’re both a great read. It’s interesting to think that not long ago we would see multiple guides on home etching boards and now we’ve climbed the production ladder to guides that help better utilize PCB fab houses. Neat!

This project seems a logical spinoff of [Arsenijs]’s ZeroPhone Pi smartphone project, a finalist for the 2017 Hackaday Prize that makes a low-cost phone using a stack of PCBs. One imagines that while prototyping the phone [Arsenijs] ended up with a lot of wasted space! Fill that up with smaller designs like breakouts, or decorative items like a hackerspace business card. If you’re looking for small PCBs you can find a few in the files area of the project on Hackaday.io. Otherwise, you can share yours and [Arsenijs] will add them.

Roll Your Own 64GB SD Card From An EMMC Chip

November 18, 2016 by 11 Comments

It’s well-known that buying Flash storage devices from cheap online retailers is fraught with danger. Stories abound of multi-gigabyte drives that turn out to be multi-megabyte ones engineered to falsely report their capacity. So when [Jason Gin] found a source of 64GB Toshiba eMMC chips for only $6 per device he bought a few, but was prepared for disappointment.

To test them, he decided to use an SD card interface. There are minor differences between eMMC and SD, but the interfaces are electrically the same and in most cases an SD controller will happily do business with an eMMC. It was not however an easy task to connect the two — these eMMCs were in BGA packages, hardly the easiest ones to work with. He resorted to dead-bug soldering the relevant interface wires to SD lines, and connecting up his computer.

His first attempt was something of a failure, wiring the chip to the PCB of a cheap USB-to-SD adaptor. This did not put him off though, he followed it up by cracking open a very old 2GB SD card that contained a PCB instead of being potted, and soldering his eMMC in place of its Flash and controller. This even fit in the original SD housing, and met with success when plugged into more reliable SD card readers. He was thus able to confirm the capacity of his chips.

His blog post is worth a read for more than just the very fine soldering involved. He takes us through some of the intricacies of SD interfacing, as well as talking at length about the decoupling and termination required to make a reliable connection. We particularly like his use of an area of unconnected BGA balls as prototyping space for decouplers.

If you marvel at the exceptional dexterity required for hand BGA work, we’ve a couple of other treats for you. There is this TI infra-red sensor BGA soldered to a piece of stripboard, and this wafer-level chip package soldered to an SOIC prototyping board.

FR4 Machine Shield Is A CNC Milling Machine From FR4 PCB

June 4, 2016 by 21 Comments

The people behind the PocketNC heard you like CNC PCB mills, so they milled you a PCB mill out of PCB. They announced their surprising new open source hardware product, a pocket sized 3-axis CNC machine entirely made out of FR4 PCB material, aptly named “FR4 Machine Shield”, at this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire.

UPDATE: The FR4 Machine Shield is now on Kickstarter

fr4_thumbWe know the concept from quadcopters, little robots, and generally things that are small enough to make use of their PCBs as a structural component. But an entire CNC machine, soldered together from a few dozen PCBs certainly takes it to the next level.

There is no doubt that 2mm thick fiber reinforced epoxy can be surprisingly rigid, although the Achilles heel of this method might be the solder joints. However, it looks like all load bearing, mechanical connections of the machine are supported by tightly interlocking “dovetail” finger-joints, which may help protecting all the solder connections from the strain hardening effects of continuous stress and spindle vibrations.

As you might expect, most of the wiring is embedded into the FR4 frame construction, and to squeeze the maximum value out of the PCB material, the motor driver boards interface via card edge connectors with the (currently Arduino based) controller board. In addition to the milling head, which features a brushless DC motor and a tool coupler, the team wants to develop heads for circuit printing, microscopy, pneumatic pick and place, hot air reflow, and 3D printing.

With all those cost-driven design choices, from the one-step manufacturing process of the frame and wiring to the dismissal of screws and nuts from the frame assembly, the “FR4 Machine Shield” could indeed become one of the cheapest CNC machine kits on the market. The team targets an introduction price of $400 during a Kickstarter campaign in June 2016. Can they deliver? [Gerrit] checked Pocket NC out at the Faire and ended up raving about how they run their business.

Enjoy their teaser video below!

Continue reading “FR4 Machine Shield Is A CNC Milling Machine From FR4 PCB” →