Mach Card Is a Custom NFC-enabled PCB Business Card That Transmits a URL on Tap and Lights Up an LED All Powered Wirelessly From Your Phone.

I wanted a way to share my links and contact info that felt personal and technical at the same time. A paper business card felt boring. So I designed this as a way to learn PCB design while making something I'd actually use and hand out.

EasyEda and JLCPCB

First began by going to EasyEda and making an account, Create a new project and open the schematic editor. For the Schematic we will need a capacitor, a resistor, a 2V LED,antenna, and a NFC chip:

1. A NT3H2111W0FHKH NFC Chip: this will be the main component of our card -- it both handles the NFC functionality as well as harvests energy from the phone to light up the LED
2. An ~2V LED. I'm using C2296, but feel free to pick a different color (note: this part may also be called 17-21SUYC/TR8)
3. A 47Ω resistor
4. A 220nF capacitor
5. A community contributed antenna

Make the schematic (To add the antenna, search for 25X48MM_NFC_ANTENNA in the Library, and instead of JLCPCB Assembled, select User Contributed.) following the image and organize it to your liking. Next To convert the schematic into a PCB design file, click Design > Convert Schematic to PCB. You may get a warning about unfinished nets -- this is fine, just click "No, Keep Going."

Here are the dimensions I'll be using which is standard in the US, but feel free to make your business card a different size!

1. Board Outline: Round Rectangular
2. Width: 88.9mm
3. Height: 50.8mm
4. Radius: 4mm

Drag the components around until you're happy with the placement. Now, we have a bunch of components on the card. If we were to have the card manufactured right now, it wouldn't work -- the components are not connected to each other! We need to add traces to connect the components together. It's best practice to manually route your traces, using the first button in the PCB tools panel: the Track tool(However you can use the autorouter provided). Then check your DRC and fix any errors that may show up.

We'll mostly be using the silkscreen layer to add our information and designs. Select the TopSilkLayer by clicking the yellow rectangle in the Layers and Objects panel. This will make sure that you're on the silkscreen layer.

In the PCB Tools panel, select the Text tool. If you want to make it a business card, you can add your name and contact info -- or add any other text you want. Select the text object you just placed, and change the font, line width, and size in the right sidebar.

EasyEDA also supports importing images! I'll use this to add a QR Code that links to my website. I used QRCode Monkey to generate a QR Code, then use the File > Import > Image option to import it. (Note: we've been placing everything on the yellow TopSilkLayer. This means that they will all appear on the top side of our board. If you want to add anything to the bottom, use the green BottomSilkLayer)

Go TO JLCPCB and upload your gerber files and get and instant quote and order your pcb, If you add multicolor silkscreen make sure to tweak the setting(JLC Multi-Color Silkscreen, Enig, 1U Copper, etc) to make sure you get your desired pcb.

After receiving your PCB...

Test out your NFC card by flashing a URL to your personal website, or your personal phone number, or even create your own NFC scavenger hunt game by encoding text to NFC.

Flashing data to NFC

Some NFC RFID readers, such as the ones on iPhones, may have trouble reading or writing the card - this is because the card hasn't been initialized from the factory yet. To initialize the chip, start off by installing an app with the capability to use custom NFC commands, such as NFC Tools IOS or NFC Tools Android. Then, flash the NFC card with this Advanced NFC command, A2:03:E1:10:6D:00,A2:04:03:04:D8:00,A2:05:00:00:FE:00 . This will format the chip and allow it to be written to. You can find more information about the flashing process here on GitHub.