Flippin’ Cool Business Card
This electronic business card is business in the front, but party in the back with over 400 LEDs to keep you entertained.
If your day job is in the field of electronics, it may often feel more like work than play to get out your soldering iron and multimeter for hobby projects on the weekends. But that need not be the case. As hardware engineer Nick Johnson demonstrated, by adding the right components, a hobby project can be business in the front, but party in the back. His electronic business card may give off the vibes of a 9 AM status meeting on a Monday morning, but when you flip it over, it is Friday night at the sports bar.
Johnson’s custom PCB business card has the usual, boring, business-speak and contact details silk-screened onto the front. But the back, oh, now that is another story entirely. The back of the flip-card, as it is called, is covered in a 21 x 21 grid of tiny LEDs for fantastic blinkenlights displays. The light show is controlled by an RP2350 microcontroller, which is the same chip found on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 development board.
An accelerometer was also included in the build to detect motion. It only takes a little shake to turn the flip-card on, then this business card becomes all fun and games. That starts up a Fluid Implicit Particle simulation in which the LEDs simulate water sloshing around as you tilt and flip the card. Even if you are stuck at a status meeting, toying around with a flip-card under the table would help to brighten your day.
The hardware design files and firmware have been made available on GitHub under a permissive MIT license. As such, you could even modify things to suit your own tastes. Perhaps adding a few buttons and coding a snake game is more your speed? Whatever the case may be, go grab the files and get busy on your own weekend project.