>It has a USB port in the corner. If you plug it into a computer, it boots in about 6 seconds and shows up over USB as a flash drive and a virtual serial port that you can use to log into the card’s shell.
No way I'm plugging a business card into my computer.
Well, it does kind of have the name and contact info of the guy on the card. If something goes wrong you know where to find him and hit him with a wrench.
I suppose that's true, but having it say that would be obviously fake. If you forge the details just slightly so that it's believable it would I guess work as an attack. Daily reminder to myself that there's no faith to be had in humanity.
Haha I remember this post, really cool stuff! When I clicked on this, I imagined it was going in the same direction, but unfortunately this card is only for aesthetics. It’s still really cool!
> In this repository I will explain the steps I followed to create this Business Card made out of PCB material inspired by Chris Tully's card from Hackaday[1]
I was a little surprised he chose HASL with lead for a business card that would be handled by, y'know, people at conferences, lunch meetings and so forth?
I corrected and pointed at it in the github. This project was just a quick test where I wanted to try the results. I tried making it as cheap as possible, so I cheaped out on the ~$0.10 per card that would cost me to make it lead free.
Really nice work, but why an @gmail.com email when you spend so much money and time on creating a unique identity like that? Just get a domain and "own" your identity end-to-end.
Yes, "own", because a domain is just rented out, but better than being owned by Google.
Yes! That was one of my main concerns. I have my own email domain, but it is a .xyz domain and I have had some people struggling with the QR code on the back, some QR code apps don't recognise webpages in the .xyz domain (looking at you Xiaomi camera app). They just recognise it as plain text. So you have to copy and paste it into your browser.
So I am a bit self conscious about having to explain that that thing is an email address. Will probably add it on the next batch though.
Actually very useful. It's sadly difficult to go from dxf (e.g. from a CAD software) to gerbers for PCB. Inkscape + svg2shenzhen handles it reasonably okay.
Huh, I might want to use that plugin for a side project I've been neglecting. I wanted to make a PCB and I have a program that generates the PCB traces I want as SVG (it's complicated, definitely not something to draw by hand), but I hadn't found a good way to import it into KiCad as a copper layer. I was using SVG because the PCB aligns with some laser cut plywood parts, and SVG is a good format for the laser cutter. I wanted to use the same program to generate the wood parts and (part of) the PCB layout.
(There seemed to be a route where you can export as DXF from Inscape and import that into KiCad, but if I remember correctly there wasn't an obvious way to import it as a copper layer. Maybe the situation has been improved since I last tried.)
Writing out the KiCad files in a native format was an option. KiCad files are human-readable, so it probably wouldn't be too hard to figure out how to just generate the data programmatically, I just got distracted by other projects and never got back to the project. My data is just thousands of little line segments, nothing fancy.
It looks like your script uses some KiCad libraries. My generator program is written in Haskell, so unless someone has written a binding there's probably no easy way to just use the KiCad API. But human readable text doesn't look hard to generate.
It seems like the sort of problem I was trying to solve is kind of similar to yours. (The geometry is different. I wasn't making coil-shaped traces, instead my thing was to take a voronoi diagram and for each cell print a set of interdigitized fingers inside the cell. These are for pressure sensors under a strangely-configured keyboard. But the general problem of "I can write a program to draw lines but I need it to be a PCB" is more-or-less the same.)
Yea the library I am using noted that people are always trying to write Kicad format parsers from scratch but each time they’ll run in to small issues, so it is meant to be a go-to library for this kind of thing. It’s Python though. I don’t know if there is any way for Haskell to utilize Python libraries.
Good to know. I haven't worked on this in a couple years, so I think it was with an earlier version than that. Nice to see that KiCad is steadily improving.
@author: I don't get why you ordered this from JLCPCB in Shenzhen when there's aisler.net in Europe, which would have been much cheaper. No shipping fees and no import taxes.
I've ordered several PCBs from Aisler exactly because they were cheaper than vendors from China when accounting for shipping to EU, import duties and my nerves dealing with customs.
I never had quality problems. I remember reading an email with the report from an electrical test from one of my boards, so I don't know why you say they don't do it.
I only contacted support once and it took them 2 weeks to respond. Could be better I guess, but my experience with other PCB companies tends to be worse. I'm used to never getting any replies at all.
I did feel kind of cheated when they sent me an elaborate market research questionnaire. In exchange they offered in-store credit. I took the time to fill it out and send it to them, but I never got the credit they promised. I never contacted them about it because it wasn't such a big deal, but it still left kind of a sour taste.
Thanks for sharing your experience :) I haven't had any issues so far, but then again I also didn't need their support yet.
With JLCPCB on the other hand, I've had things stuck in customs for 2-3 weeks multiple times due to documentation issues and then I had to hunt down someone at JLCPCB with the authority to provide me with a fixed invoice.
That said, I've heard that the JLCPCB DDP terms work great (where they pre-pay customs for you) but they didn't allow that in my price range.
That kind of card does seem pretty annoying though - not being able to fit in a business card holder or a wallet isn't great, I wouldn't know what to do with it. The battery holder seems like it would catch on your pocket too.
Don't want to sound like a party pooper - it would be a great thing to have a few on a table in your office for visitors to look at, but not great to give people...
Could be interesting to create one based off-of flexible PCBs. That would be closer to an actual business card as well. Of course bonus points if it actually does anything.
I added NFC on mine together with led lights that flash when near NFC and phone (android only) receives my contact info. Could show it if anyones interested.
[1] https://www.thirtythreeforty.net/posts/2019/12/my-business-c...