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 How freakin' deep geek are these!? I found them on Lady Ada's wonderful site (which you have to check out if you haven't already -- she has lots of cool DIY projects there). When she asked Todd about the grid of solder pads in the lower right, he said: "That's the prototyping area." On the back it says "electronic design & embedded systems." I MUST have a card like this! I don't give out that many cards (not more than a dozen a year). My card says "Writer, Editor, B.S. Detector." Maybe I could have a lille circuit on it to build your own BS detector. Has anyone here ever gotten PCBs made? I assume it's not cheap.
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| Circuit Board Business Cards | Login/Create an account | 8 Comments |
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Re: Circuit Board Business Cards
(Score: 1)
by mrklaw on May 22, 2006 - 02:44 PM
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Reminds me of the guy in one of William Gibson's books (or maybe it was Bruce Sterling) that had business cards that were on Mica or some other fragile material so that you had to take care of it. You couldn't just stick it in your pocket or it would crumble apart.
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Re: Circuit Board Business Cards
(Score: 1)
by trr on May 23, 2006 - 02:37 PM
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Those plated through holes on the lower right of the card are not for prototyping. Sounds like a BS detector was needed this case. A 30 hole grid wouldn't be adequate for any real prototyping.
They are there for quality assurance - checking registration of the layers, checking plating quality, checking the substrate for voids, etc. The grid of holes is normally placed on the border of the panel and the "coupon" as it's called, gets routed out along with the rest of the individual boards. It is then mounted in acrylic and microsectioned for inspection. The guy must have been a salesman, not a PCB engineer.
His name and phone number were added to the border of a panel by the designer or by a CAM person at the fab so they didn't really cost anything most likely, beyond the cost of the actual circuit boards that were being made. The phone number is in a strip of copper called "thieving" that is placed around the border of PCB panels to even out the thickness of copper plating on the panel.
It would probably be possible for you a to get a panel of nothing but these little business cards made for about $100. If you made them 2" by 3 1/2" like a regular business card you could get 48 of them on a standard 18" x 24" panel, making them $2/ea. Not cheap. If you're already having boards made you could just add them to the border like this guy did, but you wouldn't get as many and you'd need to specify to the fab that you wanted them to rout the business card part and send them to you.
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Re: Circuit Board Business Cards (Score: 1)
by gareth on May 23, 2006 - 03:18 PM
(User info | Send a Message) http://home.earthlink.net/garethb2/ | >those plated through holes on the lower right of the card >are not for prototyping. Sounds like a BS detector was >needed this case. A 30 hole grid wouldn't be adequate for >any real prototyping.
Ah, I think the guy was joking about it being a prototyping area. Just as I didn't mean that I would create an actual circuit for a BS Detector (or anything else) on a tiny PCB.
Thanks for the other info on printing PCBs. |
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Re: Circuit Board Business Cards (Score: 1)
by tm_bailey on May 23, 2006 - 03:19 PM
(User info | Send a Message) | It's actually not the number of holes that makes the thing annoying for prototyping, it's the grid spacing, which is .06" on center, which as I'm sure you know is not standard lead spacing for much of anything. Limited as it is it remains better than any other prototyping area I carry in my pocket from day to day. I laid them out that way because they looked sharper than .1" holes, in my opinion. They were panelized on a ~7.75" x 2.75" PCB and routed out manually (slowly) with a vertical mill and a jig I made for routing business cards. It was a tossup whether or not to shell out for buried vias and some gold fingers to impress the haters, but I went for "understated". And including shipping they cost about $3 (not $2) each, so there.
And hey, if you're crusing for "fisher-price my first PCB designs" you should at least check out my watch. No ground plane, even. Tuh.
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/05/concept_bling_binary_led_watch.html
The new ones are cast a lot better.
xoxoxoxo,
TMB |
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Re: Circuit Board Business Cards (Score: 1)
by torpor on May 24, 2006 - 04:47 AM
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i knew i'd seen this idea before somewhere, and i found out where .. on my desk i have two 'normal' business cards from PCB vendors, also with on-board circuit and trace - www.europrint.be & www.jlp.de - so if any of you gen-4 geeks wanna tag along, just hit these guys up for some samples ..
the one from jlp is blue (!) with gold trace, and it is pimp, while europrints has the bonus that it can be used as a bookmark as well ..
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Re: Circuit Board Business Cards
(Score: 1)
by torpor on May 23, 2006 - 02:50 PM
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yeah, totally gibson microsoft, give it about urmm .. yesterday .. and you'll be plugging them into your ear to hear the pitch ..
be nicer if he did it with a versalaser!
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Re: Circuit Board Business Cards
(Score: 1)
by farslayer on May 24, 2006 - 12:36 PM
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With a printer or photocopier you can make your own board layout.. might not be quite as clean as the one pictured there, because I'm not sure how to pull of the Green masking at home, but anyway.. take a look at this film you print on then transfer the image to your bare copper board using an iron, drop it in the etch tank and boom you have a PC board..
I used to make boards all the time when I was in highschool.... that was a long time ago. Radio Shack used to carry board etching kits back then, sadly now all they seem to carry is batteries and cellphones.
http://www.techniks.com/how_to.htm
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Re: Circuit Board Business Cards (Score: 1)
by gareth on May 24, 2006 - 03:42 PM
(User info | Send a Message) http://home.earthlink.net/garethb2/ | | I thought about the DIY approach and etching my own PCBs is something I've thought about learning for a while now. But as you mention, the homebrewed boards I've seen don't look very professional. I think the best bet for anyone wanting to do this (myself included) is probably trying to convince somebody who's getting some pro boards done to let you use the border for your card. |
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