Behind the Scenes

Printed Circuit Board (PCB) Medals

With NFC and Energy Harvesting Capabilities

So, what is this?

This year, instead of regular metal medals, we opted for a PCB medal design to match the theme of CoCo a bit more. What is a PCB? A PCB - printed circuit board - is simply a circuit, but permanently embedded into a board. You will find these green boards everyday around you: your remote control, laptop, phone, even all the way to airplanes and rockets.

We decided to create a circuit that can transfer a link to your phone when tapped, and also lights up an LED on the board!

How do I use it?

Simply turn on NFC mode on your phone, then hold the badge near the NFC reader (usually somewhere at the back of the phone). A photo of you and your award on the day should be on there if our staff has helped you with linking the tag. Feel free to email choit10@wis.edu.hk for help.

1000080839.mp4

33392.mp4

How do I customise the link?

Install NFC Tools (Other NFC tool apps also work)
Go to the "Write" tab
Add your link through the "Add a record" button
Press "Write / XX Bytes"
Hold your NFC badge on the reader to overwrite the link on the tag

>>Click to view more details

Inspiration

This project is open source on GitHub. Originally, this project is inspired by the NFC PCB Business card trend, but our team decided to transfer the same principles and concepts to a medal: the functionality stays the same, the form changes.

How to make your own PCB Medal?

As mentioned above, a PCB is just a circuit but on a board.

You can split a PCB design process into 2 main steps:

Schematic drawing (draw out the virtual wires between components)
Routing (draw out the physical wires)

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse