NFC Business Card

Overview

A credit-card-sized business card, 3D printed in white and black. The front has my name, contact details and a drawing of me; the back has a QR code and an NFC mark. Tap a phone on the mark and it opens my site, because there's an NFC tag sealed in the middle of the card. The model above is the exact geometry I print: drag it around, or pull the layers apart to see the tag.

Context

[Why you made it: the event or moment that made you want a card, and why a printed NFC one.]

Printing a tag inside

The card is built in layers, 0.1 mm each. Two layers of black art on the front face, a pocket just deep enough for the tag, a two-layer white lid, and two layers of black art on the back. The print pauses right after the pocket is finished, I drop the tag in, and the printer seals it over. The black art is inlaid flush, so both faces are perfectly flat.

• 85.6 x 53.98 mm with a 3.18 mm corner, the same size as a bank card
• 0.2 mm nozzle; no line thinner than 0.22 mm, so the text and QR print cleanly
• Pocket 0.6 mm wider than the tag, depth rounded up to whole layers
• The pause layer is computed and printed by the script, so there's no guessing in the slicer

A card generator

Getting the first card right took prototypes, so I turned it into a script. Fill in a short config with a name, title, email, website, link for the QR code and an optional drawing, and it lays out the card, turns the fonts and SVG art into outlines, builds the two-colour model with manifold3d and writes a print-ready 3MF for Bambu Studio, with and without a lanyard slot.

Before writing anything it checks the parts are watertight, flags lines too thin to print, warns if the name crowds the drawing, and scans the QR code back from the model to make sure it still opens the right link. Card thickness and the pause layer follow from the tag: an ultra-thin inlay gives a 0.7 mm card, a sticker 0.8 mm, a hard disc 1.8 mm.

Reflections

[What the prototypes taught you, how people react when they tap it, and what's next.]