Naive Business Card

I ordered only 5 PCBs, because I wasn't 100% sure they would work. My main concern was the thickness of about 1 mm. Eventually, soldering was easier than expected. Though I fried the first one after almost 2 hours of soldering, the second try actually worked out pretty well and only took me half an hour this time.

I received my custom PCBs after a couple of weeks after ordering them from PCBWay.

I took another shot, tuning some parameters of my Samsung s23 Ultra's camera in Manual Mode. Surprised by the quality change, I wanted to show the difference.

This is the one I fried.

While the second one, after a bit of troubleshooting, turned on!

I also did a short video demo, which I put on YouTube and in the project details here on Hackaday.

It's official, I placed the order on PCBWay!

I'm eager to see if the board will work. 😬

The cost was pretty low: $6.5, and with a discount coupon, it was just $1.5. Including shipping, I paid about $10.0.

I chose a thickness of 1.0 mm instead of the default 1.6 mm. The cost was the same, but I'm worried that the PTH components might be too heavy for the thinner board.

At the beginning, I started outlining the business card in my e-paper tablet, using a ruler to understand the actual size.

I wanted to stay simple with the electronics involved because I'm quite a newbie in this field. So, I thought about combining a couple of examples I saw in the book “Make: Electronics” by Charles Platt and the Shawn Hymel's tutorial on KiCad. Eventually, I came up with the following circuit on a breadboard. Not just any breadboard, but the Ben Eater's favourite: the BB830. :)

Some components needed to be measured carefully. So, with some datasheets at hand, I spent quite some time figuring out the exact sizes.

Ah, this is how the board looked in the KiCad 3D viewer: