Short of handing out a self-built Eurorack system with your phone number scrawled in metallic ink on the back, it’s tough to beat this all-in-one working Stylophone as a calling card that says “yeah, I’m a music tech nerd.”
I’ve seen some business cards with circuit boards before, but this one is something special. It’s an actual working USB MIDI device with a Stylophone interface – and as he points out, this is the real deal, since an original Stylophone interface itself is a bare PCB. And it’s called the “StyloCard,” the work of Tim Alex Jacobs.
For those interested, he goes into some fascinating discussion of how the idea and prototypes developed. And that’s not incidental – he’s managed to sort this out so that he can actually produce this in quantity (which is the whole point).
It’s a USB MIDI device only, but that keeps this simple, and those in the know can then use this as a USB MIDI device with anything on their host. Another win for the ATtiny85 chip! And that makes two clever ATTINY inventions on the same day.
Watch:
Hat tip to Hack-A-Day – who, like CDM, are one of the few original survivors of the blog era and remain one of my favorite sites (and to engineer Samantha Lüber for pointing me to this). They have some discussion, too:
Stylish Business Card with a Stylophone Built In
Full project details:
https://mitxela.com/projects/stylocard
He’s also produced a beautiful punched card music box:
And a tiny pitch bend joystick. (Hmm, now I wonder if this will crop up on some mobile device):
Now, this supplants what to me had been the smartest music nerd business card. Michaela Magas, known best for her role with Music Tech Fest among other EU music tech projects, has a playable metal card that doubles as a tuner, complete with indications for pitch:
Photo via Sweden’s Urban ICT Arena (sorry, Michela, didn’t have yours within reach)!
Obligatory:
It even has a USB port…
Something wrong, Peter? You’re sweating.