I just entered a project to the Hackaday business card contest, happening in 2024 between Tuesday, May 7, 2024 09:00 am PDT and Tuesday, July 2, 2024 09:00 am PDT. The contest rules are pretty open, just made a business card that has SOME electronics and that is it.

They will have honorable mentions to “wafer thin” (thin builds), aesthetics, Madman Muntz (cheap ones), fun and games and utilitarian. I guess my project will fall in the utilitarian cathegory. I will explain why.

The above image is of my project, which I already sent to PCB manufacturing. It features a Raspberry Pi Pico W (with Wi-Fi) to the right and a touch button in parallel with a mechanica switch for “wake up” functions. To the right there is a 6×6 charlieplexed LED display (using only 7 pins of Pi Pico) and a 0.96″ OLED yellow/blue display.

My plan is for the card to be in a “dormant” state where it will show time (hour and minutes) and temperature in binary on the LEDs, fetching such data from a web API. The OLED display will be displaying contact information.

When you press the touch button or the mechanical switch, the charlieplexed 6×6 LED display will probably show your e-mail (letter by letter). The OLED display will probably show more contact information in a “rolling” style.

This is why I think it will fall into the utilitarian cathegory.

Fabrication files

The schematic for the board is seen below. It is really simple since all the power will come through a USB cable.

As of the writing of this post (05/13/2024) I had sent the PCB for fabrication at JLCPCB. It takes weeks for anything from China to get to my hands in Brazil, so I don’t expect to have it before the end of June. Which is just shy of the final cut; I think I will do all right.

All fabrication files (in Kicad) are in this Github repository, enjoy. My hackaday.io project page is here. Make sure to check another project of mine a PIC16F690 dev board here.