A PCB Business Card with a Built-In Game

Business cards may seem outdated in our modern world of easily-shared electronic contacts, but they’re still a great way to stand out from the crowd when networking. In order for that to work, however, you need a business card that doesn’t just blend into the stack of other business cards that a desirable business contact is likely to receive. Among makers, electronic business cards built on PCBs are a clever way to achieve that. This PCB business card created by Lambert Le is a great example, and it even features a simple hardware game.

Le is a robotics engineer working in the toy industry in Canada, and he needed a way to show off his skill to contacts. A PCB business card seemed like a great way to do that, but he wanted something that was a little bit more interesting than the other PCB business cards floating around out there — making it less likely to get thrown away. This achieves that by allowing the recipient to play games directly on the business card. A set of capacitive touch pads are used as controller buttons and the output is on an LED matrix.

An STM32F051 microcontroller is used for logic, because it’s small, relatively energy efficient, powerful enough for simple games, and doesn’t require a bunch of other supporting components. Power comes from a small coin cell battery, which has a holder that is set into a cutout in the PCB to keep things as thin as possible. The LEDs are arranged in an 8x8 matrix, which is connected to the microcontroller’s pins directly in order to avoid the need for other ICs (integrated circuits) like shift registers. The completed business card has the minimum number of components necessary to get the job done, which is fantastic proof of Le's skills.