Peter Hill's Business Card Doubles as a Handy Protoboard for Electronic Experimentation
This clever creation is a business card you'll definitely want to keep handy.
Electrical and embedded hardware designer Peter Hill has a business card you'll want to keep handy — doubling, as it does, as a protoboard-style prototyping platform for your own electronic circuits.
"Haven't you always looked around, wished you had one more 'stripboard' or 'perfboard' for that circuit you're dreaming up or debugging," Hill asks, rhetorically, in support of his creation. "This business card might just save the day! And who knows, maybe it'll lead to a future collaboration. [It's] a PCB Business Card that doubles as a handy prototyping tool!"
The card itself, brought to our attention by Adafruit, is a plain PCB, with no components installed — making it flat enough to slide into a wallet or business card holder. Its silkscreen and copper layers provide contact information for its creator, fulfilling the purpose of a business card, and documentation on how to use it as a platform for electronic experimentation.
The bulk of the board is made up of 0.1" through-holes, arranged much like a breadboard, which can accept a range of components. There are power rails to the top and bottom, again like a breadboard, and space to fit a USB Type-C or USB Micro-B port for power — or the card can be wired up to an external power supply, complete with support for reverse polarity protection.
There are places to put decoupling capacitors, mounting holes, and even places to put common integrated circuit (IC) parts: pads for a SOIC-8-packaged op-amp, a SOT-23 linear regulator, and an oscillator.
The KiCad project files for the card are available on Hill's GitHub repository, under the permissive MIT license.