Building a Better Business Card

Amazing business cards are rare to come by, there are some awesome examples of circuitboard and CNC geared cards seen on the web. We wanted to try something different for one of our earlier projects on our newly built CNC machine, so we gave business cards a try.

We made two designs, one for show mainly, and another designed to actually give away. Above are the "show off" color changing LED business card we ended up with after a bit of thought, minimalistic in design and components to keep cost down. It utilizes the slowly fading color changing LEDs found cheaply on ebay. Here is a video:

We also have business cards designed mainly for a ruler and our information, these cards have 1/32" marks (seen below) and are accurate to +/- 0.001", double checked with digital calipers. Both of our designs were made using an evaluation copy of CamBam CAM software, a hybrid CAD/CAM program for generating g-code for CNC-like machines. We cut all of our plastics with a 60° 1/4" V-grove routing bit.

Here are the CamBam files for anyone to play with!

• Ruler Business Card
• LED Card Etching
• LED Card Cutout

We can make these acrylic CNC business cards for about $0.50, and they currently take 5 minutes each when cut from 0.09" material. At these times and prices we decided they are well worth the responses we've recieved when showing them to people. So far we have 8, but we can double that number in under and hour! So if you have access to a mill, PCB service, or any other way to help yourself stand out from the sea of business cards that some people recieve, go for it!