Trading cards with e-ink displays (2023) (opens in new tab)

I really hope the Bay Area keeps this attitude, and that other places adopt it if they haven't already:

"I live in the Bay Area. I'm biased, but this place is full of awesome engineers building things and you can just walk up to them and ask them to explain everything about their project and they will."

Edit to add: It reminds me of Jobs calling up Bill Hewlett at his home as a teen and asking him questions, and Hewlett not only answered them but gave him a summer job.

That note about manufacturing is very interesting. It is indeed very difficult to make 10s, 100s, or 1,000's of things. Let alone millions.

At my company, we (software group) took a tour of the hardware R&D lab. They have a mechanical lab and a machine shop, which does the initial prototyping. A lot of the mechanical engineers on the R&D side work on basically "dev tools" for the big factories.

An assembly has an intermittent issue with something going out of alignment; they go on site, take measurements, create a CAD model, and take it to the machine shop. Then, they take whatever fixer part to the factory and install it to fix the issue on the line.

There are so many pieces of it -- it's just like software really. The factories are only partially automated, so fixtures and mounts for things need to be ergonomic if a worker is going to place a half-finished part into a fixture 1000s of times per day. Parts have to have an obvious orientation, so it's easy to tell at a glance to know how they go into where they need to go. Every part needs to be designed to actually be manufactured, keeping in mind the limits of the machine that will be creating it, whether CNC or a mold, etc. All this, with a minimum of steps to manufacture the part, using as little material as possible, while looking good and functioning as desired.

I went to school to be a mechanical engineer and hardly any of this stuff was discussed. (It was a big research university to be fair, but still) We spent maybe 6h across my entire degree talking about the way things actually get made. Things like, why use a flat head instead a rounded head on a machine screw in a design? How to design a part to be injection molded? Sheet metal? CNC?

We need to onshore manufacturing as soon as possible, because these are all very difficult skills that require ingenuity, craft, and dedication to acquire. They only can be acquired slowly, over time, through a long career, in an environment where volume manufacturing is happening.

Nice. I've thought of various similar applications (probably because I saw such somewhere). For example conferences require lanyards with passes attached. Most contract with some company to handle all their creation, then also require you (more or less) to use their app to get a schedule, etc. Why not create a generic, re-usable pass (like OP) that attaches to your lanyard, has some basic features at a glance (schedule, your favorite emoji), and could of course be used to track or facilitate flash-gatherings as needed. IIRC defcom did something like this, I'm thinking more generic.

I think scientists I know would snap something like this up so they didn't add to their kilograms of plastic pass/lanyard waste (if conferences can be roped in to adopting them). Level them up with rare editions (conference awardees could be given titanium frames to swap over), etc. and you have a playing-card-esque market for professionals who go to 3-5 conferences a year, and a flashy feature that conferences would like to offer, etc.

Another use- digital cards that can help care practitioners communicate with their audience: "can you hand me the cards the tell me how you feel?" (cards that describe your symptoms). Customize those pictures, icons, graphics on the card as needed, on the fly, per patient type, etc. Think everything from kids bullied at school to medical and law offices where communication can be a barrier.

Just curious, is there really a "trading" aspect or is it more for deck-building type games?

Trading card games usually have a notion of rarity, collection, and, well, trading. It is a controversial aspect so I understand that you want to stay away from that as much as possible. But if you embrace this aspect, how would it be implemented?

See also:

Show HN: Trading cards made with e-ink displays https://www.wyldcard.io/blog/introducing-wyldcard

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795296 (1149 points | Nov 30, 2022 | 291 comments)

Neat project. As an aside, the following is a great creative starting point insight:

> At one point, I grabbed a stack of iPhones and splayed them out like a hand of cards. I had the idea that, if each phone displayed the image of a card, you could shuffle the deck just by pressing a button, no physical movement necessary.

But it could also lead to funny "tech thinking". For example: "Imagine we could take the messy hassle out of human conception, and monetize it as an app!"

So what's the plan for this hardware when it's no longer considered useful or operable?

It's awful when your mom tosses your baseball cards collection but at least it will be recyclable given fairly trivial and widely-implemented processes. Not so for computer components.

It just seems like a bit much for not enough.

You are asking each player to carry around this "plinth" and however many cards would be necessary to play the game in question. Do the cards start on the plinth, then go to a common area? Are games played with connected plinths?

You say "MTG meets Yu-gi-oh meets Pokemon meets Tamagotchi" but I don't really see that here. You're putting pictures on plastic cards.

And with no actual game in the two years this has popped up here, you have a real problem. Because it looks like you have a toy rather than a game. And not a great toy either, to be honest. I'd focus less on marketing and articles and more on coming up with at least one proof-of-concept game.

Because the game is what's going to sell the hardware. There's no way you're going to push many units with only the promise of game(s) in the future.

I don't have much business being in this thread but I wanted to add that I appreciate the inclusion of lesser-seen details like the sacred geometry in the board.

People sometimes mock how in Star Trek they'd occasionally have a bunch of PADDs splayed out on a table, almost using the futuristic tablets as if they were clipboards instead of how someone might use a real computer or tablet.

Then we get projects like this, which I see as a step towards that future.

For those interested in novel and quirky uses of e-ink displays, you might also want to see these: https://lightnote.cardonabits.com

Disclaimer: I design and build these. And I'm also a big fan of jonahss work.

Show HN: from the dev https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795296

I'm sure this could be done, today, much more elegantly, flexible e-paper is available without being attached to some heavy clunky PCB, and flexible PCBs are easily do-able, you only need a fairly small/simple mcu and power the whole thing by inductive loops. I reckon you could probably get something close to the size/feel of a credit card, if not more bendy/flexible.

(you might even be able to get away with a tiny capacitance to hold enough power to reset the display to a 'back pattern' when it's removed from the inductive loop 'board', depends on the mcu I guess).

A button to update the card shouldn't be needed, you can detect it via whatever NFC you're using.

Since nobody in this or the original thread has asked this and I can't find any reference to it in the post - why is there a cable that connects the device to itself?

Is that the tree of life printed on the PCBs?

I have an idea for such an e-ink display. Are there pre-made e-ink displays out there with maybe a couple of buttons of input and maybe wifi for software update? I imagine it could be running something like Pico-W and have an e-ink display? Any ideas?

Edit: turns out someone had already posted about this widget called a "Pimoroni Badger" and it fits the bill nicely: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/badger-2040-w?variant=405...

I've thought about this concept a lot.

Cards are kind of tricky because you probably have a good number of them that will require many updates, and I suspect having a configurable board would actually unlock more cool stuff. Something like RFID cards that an EInk board could detect when placed and render game impacts would be nifty.

Smart cards (and of course just plain old video games) let you do a bit of fun stuff like interact with piles without everyone seeing that you interacted with a specific pile.

My real dream is to have it on dice to have on the fly configurable distributions of outcomes.

Saw this at OpenSauce this weekend. Very cool concept. Obviously the price per unit (card) of the DevKit is a bit...steep. But at mass production scales it could be very reasonable. Especially if there were a dozen or more card games you could plan on it?

I hate "lets make it electronic just for the sake of electronics" because ewaste. But if you can take something and make it into "buy once, use forever(ish)"... that's awesome.

looks like there is still a pcb within the enclosure?

not sure exactly how e-phoretic screens are driven, but I wonder if you could remove the controller entirely? have just a loose eink screen with a zif that you pass around

like this thing is 0.25mm thick https://www.adafruit.com/product/4262#technical-details

This is really cool. Sorry to change the topic a bit, but I have been thinking about adapting something like this for a screen that you can place on your desk or work bench to use it as a physical "away message" so that people know where you are when you are not at your desk (i.e. @lunch, @meeting, @microscope, etc..) Ideally, it would connect to wifi so that you can update it remotely.

That's very cool. Love seeing these types of things.

If they were thinner and wider, I suspect that an almost unlimited number of uses could open up for them.

It reminds me of the old West End Games / Legends description of the game sabacc in Star Wars. Instead of being played with normal paper cards as seen in Solo, the players received cards with screens on them At certain parts in the game, the cards would randomize. '

A completely baroque way of playing, but fits with a world where actively powered antigravity technology has replaced wheels.

Interesting choice for the layout of the contacts, the "10 Sfirot"

https://i.pinimg.com/474x/52/db/70/52db70262ac28239669a45d88...

He doesn't mention it in TFA

These look really good, I love the style. Don't know if I'm interested in them as trading cards but posters or "stickers" with this style actually seem like a very cool idea. Instead of traditional paper stuff you get a display thing which you can change and make better or fit your taste more.

> I drew inspiration from the fictional games I wished existed when I was in school, like Yu-gi-oh

Yu-gi-oh exists though, there are lots of tournaments around the world and even world championships. The game is pretty similar to the one played in the anime, if not the same

Nice layout of the connection pins, though I question your number assignments. :)

This is cool. I hope the cost of eink plummets so this is actually viable.

What version of the 10 Sefirot is the pin pattern?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sefirot

I really hope he patent this. This is a very unique way of using e-ink screens. I could totally see this blowing up in the games world.

This is so cool and potentially has a nice overlap with badge life enthusiasts.

For the uninitiated:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbne9a/a-history-of-badgelif...

is there a way to make this thinner like an actual trading card?

I know everyone who dares to say anthing about NFTs gets downvoted, but I'll do it. In this case, making the cards an NFT can make this really cool. Some sort of global immortal database where the rarity etc. is defined. Could also have nothing todo with crypto if the dev/publisher pays for the servers.