Designing a PCB businesscard seems to be the go-to for a hobbyist electronic engineers. Most people design either a passive PCB, USB HID/MSD device or battery powered LED frenzy. Uptill now I haven’t seen any cart that has a RFID, not even regular paper ones. As usual it started with a brainfart and I designed a burner PCB. Usually I try to design a perfect one which in the end needs at least two revisions to make it perfect. Now I tried a different route and designed a small pcb with solderjumpers and lot of bodge options:
The main ingredient is a nice little NFC EEPROM from NXP: NT3H1101. This is the 1K version which can be read or writen over both NFC and I2C and also has an energy harvesting mode which allows a small and powerefficient microcontroller to do some extra fancy and interacting stuff. To interact 4 buttons and a LED are added. The LED tells you in which state the microcontroller is and the buttons change the URL that is sent to the phone (or RFID reader).
After playing with the burner PCB I came with a simple but robust firmware and designed the final design. Pressing one button will alter the URL the next time the PCB is presented to the reader. Unfortunately I forgot to connect the LED to the microcontroller as I was too busy with getting the silkscreen and soldermask right. I still need to tackle the sharp and protruding components on the front, which will ruin your wallet. The back PCB art is done by printing my regular businesscard to waterslide decal and apply it to the back. The process is described here.
Note: the name and telephonenumber is blurred on purpose
Where can I get one ? (card)
If you got business for me, I might send you one 🙂
If you ever consider selling these I’d eagerly buy one
Do you plan to make a step-by-step instruction public in the future or sell unconfigured PCBs?
I’ll come up with a compatible board (with the some of the functionality as this one) eventually. That one is more prototype friendly then this one.
Prolly will take a couple of weeks. If you have a more urgent need please contact me and we can work something out.
Can you install a short video presentation on the card?
The space available is relative small (this one has 1kbyte) so storing a video is not possible. You can provide a link to youtube or the video itself though.
Than I’ll probably wait till you sell it preconfigured. I think those card might be cool since I’m doing innovation consulting.
Best
Jonas