ATtiny-Powered Business Card Plays Cracktro Hits

July 29, 2025 by Matt Varian 11 Comments

PCB business cards are a creative way to show your tech skills while getting your name out there. This take on a PCB business card, sent in by [VCC], tackles one of the big challenges with them: making them in such a way that they are cheap enough to not feel bad about handing them out.

These cards plug into a USB port for power and have over a dozen small LEDs that light up the stars on the front, and a small buzzer that can play over ten minutes of cracktro music. To keep the cost down, [VCC] went with an ATtiny1616 microcontroller costing under 50 cents and still having plenty of outputs to drive the buzzer and LEDs. The final per-unit cost prior to shipping came out to only 1.5 euros, enabling them to be handed out without worrying about breaking the bank.

To aid in the assembly of the cards, [VCC] 3D printed a jig to apply material to the back of the USB connector, building up its thickness to securely fit in the USB port. He also wrote a small script for assembly-line programming the cards, getting the programming process down to around ten seconds per card and letting him turn through prepping the cards. Thanks, [VCC], for sending in your project—it’s a great addition to other PCB business cards we’ve featured.

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Creative PCB Business Cards Are Sure To Make An Impression

May 5, 2025 by Matt Varian 8 Comments

Business cards are a simple way to share contact information, but a memorable design can make them stand out. [Jeremy Cook] has been experimenting with adding artistic finishes to PCBs, and has recently applied what he’s learned to make some unique business cards. His write-up consolidates some great resources to get you started in making your own PCB business cards, as well as PCB art in general

To make his cards stand out, he designed them to serve as functional tools beyond sharing contact information. He created two designs: one incorporates an LED and a coin cell battery holder, while the other includes drafting tools, such as a ruler, circle stencils, and a simplified protractor.

While the classic PCB solder mask is green, many board houses now offer alternative finishes and colors to enhance designs. He tested and compared the offerings from various manufacturers, highlighting the importance of researching fabrication options early, as different providers offer a variety of finishes. His creative approach shines in details like using through-hole pads as eyes in a robot illustration, making them stand out against a halftone dot pattern.

If you’re looking for more inspiration, be sure to check out the winners of our 2024 Business Card Challenge.

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Folding Butterfly Keyboard

October 16, 2024 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

Want to give prospective employers a business card that doesn’t immediately get tossed? Of course you do. If you’re one of us, the answer is obvious: make it some kind of a PCB.

A PCB business card that doubles as a keyboard. — Image by [Ricardo Daniel de Paula] via Hackaday.IO

But as those become commonplace, it’s imperative that you make it do something. Well, you could do a lot worse than giving someone a fully-functioning capacitive-touch keyboard to carry around.

[Ricardo Daniel de Paula] initially chose the CH32V303 microcontroller because it has native USB 2.0 and 16 capacitive touch channels, which can support up to 48 keys via multiplexing.

But in order to reduce costs, [Ricardo] switched to the CH582M, which does all that plus Bluetooth communication. The goal is to have an affordable design for a unique, functioning business card, and I would say that this project has it in spades.

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2024 Tiny Games Contest: Neat PCB Business Card Was Inspired By The Arduboy

September 13, 2024 by Lewin Day No comments

The humble business card is usually a small slip of cardboard with some basic contact details on it — but as hackers know, it can be so much more. [Marian] has provided us a great example in the form of his own digital business card, which doubles as a handheld game!

Wanting to make his business card more interesting for better engagement, [Marian] was inspired by the Arduboy to give it some interactivity. He chose the STM32G030F6 microcontroller as a cheap and reliable option to run his business card. He then created a 10×9 LED matrix display using Charlieplexing to minimize the amount of I/O pins required. For controls, he went with the usual directional cross plus two action buttons. He implemented a variety of games on the card—including a Flappy Bird clone and a game similar to the classic Simon toy.

Files are on GitHub for the curious. We’ve featured some other great business cards this year, too. Indeed, we ran a whole challenge! If you’re cooking up your own exemplary little PCB to hand out at conferences, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Now Even Your Business Card Can Run Linux

December 24, 2019 by Tom Nardi 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 Jenny List 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.

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Magic 8 Ball Business Card Will Answer All Your Questions

April 5, 2018 by Lewin Day 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.