While looking for some parts for a specific project, I needed an overview of the most significant chip companies. After a quick search, only very old stuff came up. So I decided to scrape Wikipedia’s list of notable semiconductor companies, and use whatever logo’s came up for a poster:
You can download the PDF by clicking the image.
At Interactive Objects, we needed a new business card. Business cards have been the method of leaving a token for keeping in touch. Despite all the prophets declaring it dead every decade with vCards, Bumps, etc., the traditional, physical business card is still going strong.
We wanted to create a business card that is more than just a piece of paper. We’ve long revered the print-like quality of printed circuit boards (PCB’s). We use the Arduino platform in a lot of our projects. And a happy coincidence: the board layout of an Arduino snugly fits the size of a traditional business card (85 x 55mm). The idea was born to hand out one of our most important tools to the people we meet.
The Business-carduino is a 0.5mm thick PCB with black soldermask and lead-free tin plating. The circuit on the right makes it a fully functional Arduino, after soldering some parts. Most of the lettering is actually copper in stead of silkscreen, so the letters are really crisp and shiny:
If someone who got our business card is interested, we’ll also give them a small bag with components and instructions on how to assemble and use the card as an Arduino.
The board layout was done in Eagle. Since Eagle does not support custom typefaces, we used Illustrator and todbot’s excellent DXF-import ULP for the logo and contact details. The Arduino layout is based on components from Sparkfun’s Eagle libraries.
We’re pretty confident that this card is the most versatile and useful business card ever! There are hundreds of thousands of open source projects with Arduino, it’s compatible with hundreds of shields and will suit many beginner and advanced projects. Let us know what you think!
Download the source files:
businesscarduino.zip
Since we first initiated the InteractiveObjects collective, some three years ago, we’ve been working on a lot of awesome projects. Every time we meet someone who’s interested in our services and earlier projects we had to pull out our smartphone to browse through a collection of photographs. So we thought it was about time to get a proper website online. We decided to go for WordPress with a nice portfolio theme. We’ll be adding a bunch of projects and content to this website over the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for new stuff!