PCB Business Cards Gone Wild [Keyboards, Computers, Drums!]
With the proper skills and a–physically and metaphorically–fat wallet, you too can make and distribute your own ridiculously awesome business card
Business cards are nominally meant to be inexpensive informational tokens. Some, however, have taken the business card form-factor and created printed circuit board (PCB) designs👇 that you wouldn’t give away to just anyone that you meet at a trade show.
Monstrosities? Yes. Awesome? Also yes.
Business cards? Debatable. Below are a few of my favorites, even if my opinion of the “perfect” PCB business card1 takes a more subtle form:
Altair 8800 emulator-on-card
First off, here’s 👆 one of the winners of the 2024 Hackaday (HAD) business card contest, a Pocket Altair 8800 computer emulator. As cool as it is, good luck stuffing that into your wallet. For that matter, good luck giving them away to random strangers at a show (without visibly gritting your teeth when you consider the effort involved).
Seems the contest judges at HAD chose to weight the cool factor over usability as an actual business card. Still, if you really wanted to impress someone, this card would be hard to beat.
Miniature keyboard
Also seen on Hackaday, this keyboard business card is a bit more functional as something you might actually give away (and fit in your wallet), even if it’s still fairly complex. Capacitive sensing is used for each character input, and the PCB itself forms the USB-C connector. Very clever.
PCB business card… from the past (2012)
With the relatively recent proliferation of quick-turn PCB manufacturing, wildly involved PCB business cards are arguably more accessible than ever before.2 Even so, PCB business cards are not entirely new. This card by Brian Carrigan was featured on Makezine in 2012, and acts as a thumb drive with his resume and contact info when you plug it in to your computer’s USB-A port (since USB-C was yet to be officially implemented).
Electronic drum kit (& an entire lightweight OS)
Finally, here’s one that I just saw today3 on Hackster.io, a business card with an entire drum kit built in! First, notice the beautiful printing on its PCB. This multi-color silkscreen service is a very new feature at several quick-turn PCB manufacturers as of this writing. Secondly, Hackster reports:
…this business card doesn’t contain a microcontroller like you might expect. Instead, it has an Allwinner F1C100S SoC. That has a 533MHz Arm CPU and 32MB of embedded DDR RAM, making it capable of running an entire lightweight operating system.[!!!]
Yes, it’s an actual modern-ish computer… on a business card. Wow.
Another practical and beautiful example (for everyone!)
As seen in the image above and in this writeup, I’m not the only person that prefers understated and easily manufacturable (i.e. give-away-able) PCB business cards. Dima Shlenkevitch made some very nice cards that shouldn’t metaphorically break the bank when purchased, or literally break your wallet when you try to stuff a couple inside.
For these cards, Dima is using ENIG (gold) plating for his name and other shiny bits, with a black solder mask on most of the PCB, and white silkscreen lettering. His PCBs are .8mm (which I use) or .6mm thick.
He outlines a number of really nice looking practical PCB-cards in the linked post. Honestly, from a pure aesthetics standpoint, he may have me beat. OTOH, you can’t use any of his designs to draw perfect 20mm circles and 45º angles as you can with mine. So there!
Tip of the PCB card iceberg
As with my PCBs as art post, this is really only the tip of the PCB business cards iceberg. While I wouldn’t say that they are common in the world of business–or even engineering–they’re not unheard of in the right circles either. Certainly some readers of this publication have seen such contraptions, and perhaps even manufactured their own.4 I think they’re awesome, even if they’re a bit harder to procure these days, given the current U.S. tariff environment.
Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow my weekly posts about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes.
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Addendum/Footnotes:
My perfect PCB business card👇
The Perfect PCB Business Card
Waaay back in February 2025, I outlined how you can make artistic designs on circuit boards, highlighting a few of my favorites. But where does the world of art end and the realm of practicality begin?
Well they were when I originally wrote this and qeue’d it up. The recent U.S. tariffs have made this less appealing as of late.
Today, as in when I’m writing it on March 22, 2025. I have no idea when this will actually be published as my to-be-published queue runs deep. The point is, it’s a recent innovation.
Now I’m coming back to this on April 23, 2025 (I have a lot of writing in queue at any one time). Since then I’ve expanded my business card collection, and have even come up with a hexagonal mounting/framing system for posterity:
I’m now looking at this post again on June 10th, 2025 for publication tomorrow. Finally.
What do I estimate the chances of someone(s) reading this having designed built their own PCB business card?
Typically around 200 people read my posts. Eliminating my mom (thanks for reading) and Elizabeth Cook (who is a literary master, but not a PCB master), that leaves 198. Presuming 10% of the remaining readers are PCB-people, 19.8 readers could have designed such a PCB, but I’d guess only 1/20 of those capable enough to do so… have done so. And I doubt anyone has hired the job out.
So perhaps ~1 person who is reading this has a personalized PCB business card. Don’t be shy. Identify yourself in the comments and promote yourself/your masterpiece/awesomestrosity!