Custom Cards with DriveThruCards.com

Posted on March 19, 2024 by Maker Block

I’ve been looking to get some playing sized cards for various purposes recently. I’ve enjoyed making my own cards from blanks ordered off of Amazon, but for things that might get used a little more regularly, it would actually help to have these things pre-typed/printed. And, as a long-time / returning enthusiast of a particular card card game, I was also looking to print up some proxy cards for casual play. I don’t want counterfeit cards – just make some obviously unofficial stand-ins for real cards in casual play.

Cost Breakdown
1. If you do any kind of Googling about searching for a company to print up cards of various sizes, you’ll quickly end up at MakePlayingCards.com – or a company that has a website that looks nearly identical to MPC. Getting a single deck of custom cards printed up through MPC is $26.15 for up to 108 cards (they offer incremental price breaks) plus $11.99 shipping (with tracking taking about 20 days) as the cheapest option, coming to $40.17 (including some tax). This is roughly $0.37/card.
2. Lurking in some Reddit forums, I found a few suggestions on different ways to create proxy Magic: the Gathering cards. These forums renewed my interest in getting some cards printed up – and lead me to DriveThruCards.com. I just placed an order for 120 cards,1 but I’ll describe the cost for 108 cards for an apples-to-apples comparison. A single deck of custom cards printed through DTC is $12.42, plus $5.99 shipping (USPS Ground Advantage and anecdotal evidence from Reddit suggests ~10 days), plus $1.00 in tax, comes to $19.41. This is roughly $0.18/card.
Benefits / Costs
1. There’s no question the MPC website is cleaner and slicker, featuring drag and drop options, without a lot of technical jargon about printing, colors, etc. They also seem to have many more options for card sizes, materials, and finishes. They also have lots of templates in various formats to download and populate. The obvious downsides are the length of shipping required and the cost, both estimated to be roughly twice that of DTC which is apparently in Overland, Kansas.
2. The DTC website is… by their own admission, “challenging to learn.” While I’m sure the interface permits a ton of customization, the dizzying array of options is daunting. They have lots of guides on their website and knowledge base, as well as elsewhere, but it’s probably too much information. I went with DTC for my first custom card order because I wanted to inexpensively try out some ideas and I figured that after the first order, I’d probably get the hang of their system. However, one thing that really sets DTC apart is the responsiveness of their customer service. I’d emailed them in the middle the day and middle of the night (aka goblin hours) and someone always back to me super fast. Although DTC doesn’t have official PDF templates, Brian with DTC kindly whipped one up and emailed it to me which answered tons of my questions.
Anatomy of a Printed Card
1. Both MPC, DTC, and other print-on-demand (POD) websites have numerous descriptions, graphics, tutorials, and samples all using slightly different words, relating to the various sizes, printing zones, etc. I found it incredibly confusing. Now, I’m not certain I’ve gotten everything right, but here’s my best understanding…
  Annotated sample poker card
  1. Cut Line / Trim Line / Bleed Line.
    1. The area described by the solid black line will be where the card is trimmed to the exact dimensions of the card. The good thing about knowing what this line means is that if you know the final dimensions of your type of card, this is easy to look up and then design everything else around it.
    2. Importantly, you don’t want to include this line in your designs. The purpose of the “safe” zone area is so the critical components of your design are certain to appear on the final product – even if it is perhaps slightly offcut. The purpose of the “bleed” zone is to make sure a “full art” card doesn’t have bits of white or black at the edge if it is very slightly miscut.
  2. Safe Area Line / Border. The important part to know here is that the distance from the “cut line” to the safe area is 1/8″ or 3.175 mm on all sides. Thus, if you know the dimensions of the card you want, you just make sure your critical art and text don’t exceed this area. All the area inside the safe area line is the “safe zone.”
  3. Bleed Box / Bleed Area / “Full Bleed” / Page Size. As with the Safe Area Line, this is easy to figure out – it’s just 1/8″ or 3.175 mm outside the edges of the cut line. This should be a rectangle.
Software / Design Process
1. I don’t have Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, or Affinity Publisher – and I wasn’t going to buy / subscribe to any of these just for this one project. What I do have, however, is OpenSCAD and Inkscape. Using OpenSCAD I started with a rectangle of the precise dimensions to match the exterior of the “US poker” card I wanted printed, then exported this to an SVG file. I then did this for a rectangle of the “bleed box” size, safe line, and also the trim line. I then imported all of these into Inkscape, layered them, and used them as guides while I designed my cards. I made sure the critical areas were within the safe line, but made the safe line, trim line, etc all invisible. Inkscape will allow you to export a file into a PDF file format which DTC accepts. I created fronts and backs for cards, each exported as a separate PDF, then combined all of them using one of my favorite pieces of freeware, PDFTK.
Potential Issues, Fixes
1. Unembedded Fonts. Apparently Inkscape did not embed all of the fonts used in the creation of the PDF. When I tried to upload the PDF originally, DTC’s uploader balked at this and said I’d need to embed the fonts. While I used a different PDF program (Foxit PDF is reasonably full featured and way less expensive than Adobe) to embed the fonts, I think I could have simply re-exported all the card faces as images instead of PDFs, then combined those into a new PDF which just had pictures (including pictures of the desired text). It might have been possible to change the fonts as well to be more uniform, but given the number of cards I was creating, I didn’t want to do that.
2. Currency. I’m putting this here more for me than anyone else who might stop by. At some point while using their website I accidentally did something which made all the prices and calculations appear in the Japanese Yen. :/ I’d been through the account settings numerous times and even cleared my cookies and website cache trying to fix this problem. After an embarrassingly long time, I gave up and emailed Brian to ask for help. As so often happens to me… moments after hitting send I saw website footer had a drop down box to choose the currency and language. Sorry Brian!

So, what’s next? Well, after placing the order at roughly 2am PST on 3/19/2024, now it’s time to just wait and find out if the cards are going to get produced and arrive! It’s now almost 6 pm PST, and their Order History page says “Sent to printer.” Some Reddit posts suggest that it takes another 1-2 weeks to actually ship.

Print On Demand Custom Cards

$20.86, if you’re being nosy [↩]

Companion Robots and Maker Faire Season!

Posted on September 23, 2023 by Maker Block

I’m super excited for Maker Faire Bay Area / Mare Island and ~~Mini~~ Maker Faire Rocklin.1 I’m not just excited to see everything, but to show all the things I’ve been working on for a while now. It’s also time to pick up all the little dev boards I’ve somehow accumulated and see if I can make anything with them to show off.

Project Boards
1. Wemos D1 Mini. A small insanely cheap (~$3?!) WiFi enabled dev board2 , which has 4MB onboard and can run Arduino. I think it can also run MicroPython, but I haven’t tested this yet.
2. Wemos 600 Pico. An even smaller, even cheaper (~$2 when ordered from China) WiFi enabled dev board that runs… MicroPython? I think?? I’m saying “I think” because I haven’t been able to get it to do anything yet.
  1. Since starting this blog post, I found a guide on installing MicroPython on Wemos boards that seems promising.
    1. Flashing MicroPython on an ESP8266
    2. https://github.com/espressif/esptool/tree/master
    3. Arguing with Python to let me use “esptool.py”
      1. esptool -p COM13 -c esp8266 flash_id
  2. As promising as that series of blog posts looked, I eventually scrapped the Wemos because it was just too much of a pain to get going with MicroPython. I think I could have made it work, but for $7 I could also just use the Adafruit QtPy I already have. The advantages of simply uploading code over a USB cable into a virtual drive just can’t be overstated.
3. Other Boards
  1. I have a bad habit of picking up dev boards. I’ve got several Adafruit QtPy’s, several Adafruit Trinkets, an Adafruit FX Sound Board, Raspberry Pi Pico (non-WiFi), various Digispark boards, a small handful of ATTiny85’s, and an even weirder assortment of VERY small programmable circuit boards (ISD1806B-COB) designed to go in greeting cards (just 6 seconds), etc.
Companion Robot
1. Background.
  1. I started this post at least a month ago when I only had a vague idea of what I wanted to make and even fewer skills. After seeing my kid’s companion robot take shape, I wanted to get in on the action and make my own. I decided to make a really small companion robot with just some LED’s, piezo, and small microcontroller unit. I’d taken a stab at making a companion robot a few years ago, but set it aside for a variety of reasons and never went back.
  2. The idea for this new robot would be something a little less ambitious, make more use of NeoPixels than in prior projects3, with a little more interactivity, trying out some CircuitPython, and… let’s be real… more pizzazz!
2. Idea: Friendly Cloud/Vapor/Flame
  1. I still really like the copper-toned PLA I’ve been using since it has something of a steampunk flair to it. I settled on repurposing a small plastic enclosure with a clear dome as the “body” for the robot. I wanted it to look something like a small entrapped / captive / domesticated4 sentient cloud of vapor or perhaps flame held within a steampunk enclosure.
  2. As a very small, inexpensive board that could run either Arduino or Circuit Python, I decided on the Adafruit QtPy M0. It could run NeoPixels, there were lots of cool guides on it, plenty of pinouts, and could definitely fit within the confines of my enclosure.
3. Enclosure:
  1. I started the enclosure by trying to design and 3D print a part to mate with the clear plastic dome. It took a few tries.
    This slideshow requires JavaScript.
  2. Once I had that, I extended the base so it could hold more electronics. I could definitely have shoehorned everything into the dome, especially if I took up some of the space inside the dome, but even with an “elevated base” it was still plenty small and could use a battery pack rather than a rechargeable lipo.
  3. Once I had a good design for the enclosure, I tried to make it work with an existing 3xAAA battery pack. In the process I yanked off the connector and ended up soldering the battery pack leads directly into the circuits.
4. Internal Electronics
  1. I’m just not a great electrical engineer and am still copy/pasting from various guides, tinkering, changing bits of code, swapping out parts, and using “close enough” resistors. Wiring up some LEDs or a piezo to a project isn’t very difficult – it’s some of the more fiddly bits.
  2. Piezo Element Speaker
    1. I wanted to use a piezo buzzer/speaker because they’re large and incredibly thin. They’re not without their downsides. The crystal wafer is also thin and a little fragile. The piezo buzzer without additional electronics has the potential to act as a knock sensor and can generate a high voltage spike which can fry a board. And, without additional electronics, the piezo just isn’t very loud. There are some libraries for the Arduino that basically double the volume of a piezo by connecting it to two pins and then running each opposite of the other, doubling the voltage difference, but they only work for Arduino chips.5
    2. After searching for various ways to increase the sound of the piezo elements, I settled on trying to use the Adafruit piezo amp. I bought two – and tried desoldering the terminal blocks. This completely ruined one. The other one worked great, but for the modest volume gain it was just too big in an already cramped enclosure.
    3. After searching around, I found some amplifier circuits using a small number of common parts.6
    4. Then I tried building an amplifier circuit using an NPN transistor. After reviewing the datasheets for my NPN transistors (and PNP transistors), and breadboarding the circuit with resistors, I sketched it a few times, laid it down with copper tape, soldered it in place with SMD resistors, then pulled it off and placed it onto a piece of Kapton tape and put another piece on top – “laminating” it in place.
  3. Capacitive Touch
    1. Buttons are great and all, but with a capacitive touch pad, I could add metallic elements to my robot rather than a much bulkier button. I bought a few brass upholstery tacks because they looked great – but they just would not accept molten solder. I ended up cutting the prongs short with wire cutters, wrapping the stub with copper tape, then soldering the wires to the tape. I’d also added a little piece of heat shrink tubing over the connection to help keep it together. It’s been working well so far.
  4. LED Animations
    1. As we know from Phillip Burgess‘ incredible “power sipping NeoPixel” guide, we can conserve power and increase the impact of the LED’s by reducing the number of LED’s, keeping max brightness ~20% for a disproportionately large impact, running fewer LED’s at a time, and even running fewer colors at a time. Between Phillip’s work, Todbot’s guide, and the specialized QtPy NeoPixel guide by Kattni Rembor, I was able to put together a few neat animations.
  5. Piezo Sounds
    1. I had a heck of time getting the piezo buzzer to do anything interesting. Fortunately, with my kid helped convert the piano music for “Paint It Black” into tones for me. I haven’t gotten all the note timings right, but I’m working on it!
Future Modifications
1. More Accessible Enclosure. Right now the “lid” with a hole for the LED ring just sits on the enclosure with a light friction fit. One idea is a hinged lid, either with a conventional hinge or perhaps a hidden swivel hinge. The problem with that, of course, is it requires even more internal space. Other ideas include a ring on top that screws down, holding the top down and in place. I’m crap at designing screw threads, so I’ve avoided this.
  Hinged lid for enclosure
2. Piezo Knocks. Perhaps the next version will include some kind of tap / double tap / knock sensors using one or more piezo elements.
3. Knobs. There’s not a ton of room inside the enclosure, but by including a gear within a gear, I might be able to rotate part of the case and have it manipulate a potentiometer.
  Offset gear within gear, manipulating an off-center internal potentiometer
4. Motors. A robot that just flashes lights and makes a few beeps can still be pretty interesting. However, I have some neat potential features that could be added with just one or two motors. There are some interesting limitations with the current incarnation of this robot and using a QtPy. I’ve only got 10 pinouts7 , 1 for NeoPixels, 1 for the piezo, 6 in use for the capacitive touch sensors, leaving 2 for other potential tasks.8 However, space is already tight so one or two micro servos would be a big space commitment. I’ve seen some really tiny micro servos that might work, but I have no idea where to source them. One silly idea is a “weapons system” using a spring loaded projectile activated by a very small servo.
  A small spring loaded projectile launcher, actuated by a small servo
5. Creating Tone Library. The basic piezo tones are easy enough to play, but including the entire list of tones and the frequencies associated with them seems eat up the poor little QtPy’s memory. I think compressing them into a library might be the way around this issue.
6. Playing WAV files. WAV files are bulky, but that’s the only sound file format a QtPy M0 can play. However, with the extra 2MB from the SPI chip installed, this shouldn’t be a huge problem. I used Audacity to mix the sound clip down to mono then to 22 KHz sample rate. My preliminary tests worked – but it was incredibly quiet. I haven’t run it through the audio amplifier yet, but I’m planning to.
7. Sleep / Deep Sleep. Ever since I swapped out the tiny LiPo for a 3xAAA battery pack, I’ve had a lot more battery life, so adding sleep / deep sleep functions haven’t been a priority. However, this inclusion just couldn’t hurt.
Other QtPy and CircuitPython Resources
1. Adafruit’s QtPy CircuitPython PWM resource
2. TodBot’s CircuitPython tricks

Companion Robots: Building Robot Friends

I just got a notice they’re no longer a “Mini”! [↩]
pinouts for my future reference [↩]
LED goggles and a Marvel Universe inspired set of “Infinity Knuckles” [↩]
OMG dome-sticated?! [↩]
This is just my very basic understanding of how it works. I’m entirely positive this is far too simplified. [↩]
And one very long article about using a lot of parts [↩]
12 if you want to count the onboard NeoPixel [↩]
Or 4… [↩]

Maker Faire 2018 – 3D Printing for Home Improvement

Posted on May 20, 2018 by Maker Block

If you’re here checking out my site after my presentation, you can check out all the slides from my presentation above. If you’d like more information about the individual things in the slides, I posted an update for most of them over on Hackaday. If you’ve still got some questions, feel free to leave a comment below, hit me up on twitter, email me directly.

How to Make Awesome Cardboard Paper Mache Anything

Posted on March 2, 2014 by Maker Block

Awesome Paper Mache Hats

A few weeks ago a friend of mine had a “bad movie night” where he was showing the film1 “Sharknado.” Inspired by the theme for the party, I decided I had to wear a shark hat for the event. After making my hat, my daughter requested a monkey hat. This was not a request I could refuse.

I took pictures of the process to show you how you can make your own. I haven’t ever tried to make paper mache hats before, so this was not only a lot of fun – but a great learning experience. While I own the really great paper mache monster books by Dan Reeder, I only used them for inspiration and tried out a few new things on my own.

Even though I used this process to make hats, the directions here could easily be adapted to making anything out of paper mache.

1. Step 1: Gather Materials and Tools

All the things you need to make your own awesome paper mache anything

Here’s what you need to get started:

Cardboard Boxes. Cardboard forms the “skeleton” of the structure. It’s cheap, ubiquitous, sturdy, and easy to cut and form.
Masking Tape. Once the cardboard has been cut, liberal use of masking tape will keep your creation together until it can be covered with paper mache.
Scissors and Utility Knife. Scissors can be very helpful in cutting cardboard or paper. While scissors can be helpful, and appropriate for kids, I find a utility knife gets the job done faster.
Measuring Tape. If you’re not making a hat (or other apparel or armor) you won’t need this. But it is helpful when making measurements. ((In a pinch, you could just use a piece of yarn or string to mark lengths, and then put the yarn on the cardboard for reference.))
Plastic Wrap. Whether you’re working with gluey paper or paint, the process is messy. I would recommend covering the work surface with plastic wrap. I happened to have a really large plastic bag, which I taped directly to the table.
Glue. I just used a big bottle of Elmer’s white glue from the hardware store, but I’m pretty sure wood glue would have worked as well, if not better. It’s also more versatile and sturdy.
Plastic Tray. The next time you get take-out or have a plastic liner from inside some packaging, save it. It makes a great wide tray for mixing water and glue or when your project is dry, it is also great for mixing paints.
Paper Grocery Bags. The “twist” with this process is that I used torn up grocery bags, rather than the traditional newspaper. It turned out this was a really good idea for a number of reasons. Paper bags are a cheap and plentiful material. When thoroughly wet strips of paper bags are easy to place, mold and shape. However, the most important features of paper bags is that they hold glue and water really well and then dry quickly into a sturdy hard shell. In fact, they form such a sturdy surface that I only had to do a single layer of paper mache around the entire hat. This means that you can quickly put down a single layer of paper bag strips all over your cardboard form, wait a few hours for it to dry, and then get to work finishing the project.
Paper or Newspaper. While grocery bags work really well to cover your cardboard form, they can leave some small gaps where they overlap. When I found gaps in the project, I simply used a few thin strips of the newsprint style paper to cover the holes and smooth out spots on the rough paper bag layer.
Cup of Water and Paintbrushes. An old mug is best and pile of cheap dollar store brushes is probably fine.
Paints. I prefer acrylic paints. They are cheap, can be diluted with water, easy to mix, they stay wet long enough for you to blend, but not so long that you have to wait days for it to dry. They also clean up well with water.

2. Step 2: Create Cardboard Form

Process for creating awesome hat

The process I used to create the cardboard forms for the hats was pretty quick and easy. I measured the circumference of my daughter’s head and then the distance from her ears to the top of her head. Using these measurements, I cut out a strip of cardboard as tall as the distance from her ears to the top of her head and as wide as the circumference of her head – with a little extra to allow for overlap.