Impressing Potential Clients with an Electronic Drum Kit on a Business Card

Go ahead and admit it: it has been years (maybe decades) since you’ve been given a business card that you didn’t just immediately throw away. If you want to get in contact with that person, you’ll go find them on LinkedIn. But the flipside is that it can be really difficult to get potential clients to remember you. The solution is to take it up to a more impressive level, as Sergey Antonovich did with this business card that features an entire electronic drum kit.

When plugged into power through its USB port, the business card will boot up. Instead of paper, it is a PCB with printed graphics showing a drum kit. Tap a drum and the business card will pump out the corresponding sound through a 3.5mm TRS audio jack. There are capacitive touch pads underneath the drum graphics, so force isn’t necessary and a light tap will do.

The term “boot up” in the last paragraph was intentional, because 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. In this case, that is a Linux operating system — though Antonovich doesn’t elaborate on the distro.

Once booted, the operating system launches the software to play the drum sounds. It isn’t clear if those are synthesized or if they’re samples, but the latter seems likely. A TTP229 IC handles the capacitive touch sensing.

Finally, some additional printed graphics on the reverse side provide information about Antonovich, including a QR code linking to his LinkedIn page.

This is certainly a lot more expensive than a paper business card. But when handed out thoughtfully, one of these could increase the chances of being remembered and landing a contract.