My First Maker Chip
Having been a Maker of Things for most of my life at this point, I have decided it is about time I made my own maker chip!
"What's a 'Maker Chip'?" I hear you ask.
It's simply a physical token, approximately the dimensions of a standard poker chip, that Makers of Things sometimes make to hand out. The Maker Chip is about equal parts calling-card, challenge coin, business card, tech demo, and promotional item. It's somewhat like a Maker Coin, but more standardized, utilitarian, and compact.
Features
If I have given you my Chip, you'll find it does a number of my favorite things:
- glows in the dark (phosphorescing)
- glows under UV/blue light (fluorescing)
- scans as a QR code (possibly how you got here!)
- scans as an NFC tag (try it if you haven't!)
It also features what I am currently using as a sort of personal logo. The JC might be my initials, it might stand for 'JoeCoin' or it might just be a couple squiggles with rotational symmetry (nice).
Construction and Design
Designing a Maker Chip can be as easy or as hard as you make it out to be. Depending on your favorite flavor of CAD, it can be easy, but the general construction is generally something like "make a disk then add designs on either side" though I went a step further and left a void in the center for print-in-place NFC tag insertion mid-print.
The standard poker chip dimensions I used were 3.33mm thick and 40mm diameter with a 5mm border area. In the border area I added colorful tabs by means of multi-material printing and an interlocking design to reduce the likelihood they would pop off at the material interface. Introducing locking geometry along material boundaries can even allow materials that are normally incompatible with one another to form a strong bond just through geometry, alone.
As I like to play with optics, I added little dashed lines that pass through the border, to be filled with material that will fluoresce under the blue light from the phosphor, resulting in a multi-color glow-in-the-dark object that only needs one color of luminescent filament.
Tools
I used several online tools to help me out in making the CAD design, mainly for the QR code which was tricky. I used Adobe's free QR Code generator to create a high-quality SVG for my design. Surprisingly, it is one of the few things Adobe continues to provide for free; it is simple and works quite well for this sort of thing. I also used a great tool called SVG2STL.com which does just about exactly what the domain name implies it does. The STL output it creates is somewhat un-customizable, but just about any CAD suite should be able to handle the appropriate scaling and rotation operations easily, as the resulting models are high-quality as well.
Easy QR Cration Tool
Powerful Online SVG to STL Converter
If you're a Maker, I highly encourage you to try this project as it exercises a lot of creative muscles. It incorporates elements of design for manufacture, CAD, personal branding, and batch production methods. At the end you get something cool that you can call your own and had out to people to get the conversation rolling!
Thanks for reading,
~Joseph
