I thought about matter in VHS Membership. Conventionally, a member of an organization would receive some sort of an item that would signify her/his dedication to that organization. Such item would usually be a small, well designed, and prestige object issued up on payment of membership fees. Such item would be hard to get, would be issued to members only, and would be used to distinguish members from general public. Some times, such item would be issued up on provision of work, or up on payment made in form of work to an organization. I think an old fashion way that such membership item is, will be appreciated. Plus, I get dizzy from going on-line, buying on-line, getting membership on-line, doing everything on-line.
I totally agree. A physical membership card would be great for things like Lee’s (who sometimes have a VHS member discount), or other similar organizations.
The reason that it hasn’t happened is simply because no one has done it yet. If you want to put a plan together, than go for it!
This would also let us restore the discounts at Lees.
I could do a PCB membership card, would get about 40 of 5cm x 5cm cards for $US25. They would have to be under 5x5 though, could be done as 30 10cmx3.3cm cards for $US25. Can do it in thin pcb then perhaps apply an rfid sticker for access to equipment?
I think membership card discussions come up at hackspaces all the time and I agree with Yuriy on this; it’s nice to have a physical token that signifies your membership.
Also being able to use the cards in our local community for discounts at shops, etc would be awesome.
In that sense I would purpose the following guidelines:
Annual issuance of official VHS Membership Cards
Year visibly printed on the card
Annual redesign of the cards; at minimum a change in the year
Card must have NFC capability to store a payload of member ID or card authentication token or future capability
A nominal fee charged for a card to cover production cost
As cool as PCBs are, they’re sorta hard on wallets (sharp edges, don’t bend well). If this is something I’m going to need to carry to get a discount at Lee’s (or, in the long term, activate equipment in the shop), I think I’d prefer a boring plastic card, though possibly one with a pretty picture.
I guess we could do both, and the masochists could carry the PCBs!
I just made a post about a contest for designs. Rather than bike shedding on particular design stuff here, we can simply vote on designs we like and go from there. I’m sure there is a way to make PCBs an awesome card, we can leave it up to the designers!
As far as protocols go, I’ve just arbitrarily chose NFC in my postings… I think at a minimum that makes sense… it’s readable by most cell phones and despite us already having some RFID equipment it’s fairly easy to get NFC reads instead/as well. Generally we can put more data on NFC so it has a brighter future.
I’d say anything in addition to NFC is fine + awesome but not necessary, I’d like to keep the requirements as simple as possible.
I think the idea might work well with a thin PCB substrate, like the
one Dave used on the EEVBlog µRuler. I believe that is a 0.5mm board
and is quite flexible. If it had radiused corners I think it would
feel and behave pretty similar to a typical credit card, though I
imagine it would be more durable.
Edit: D’oh sorry for the unnecessary bikeshedding! Because Discourse’s e-mail gateway has delays on both sending and receiving I missed @laftho’s admonition.
My suggestion of RFID cards was totally due to cost and ease, if other
media win out, who am I to judge?
I think you’re right, ktims, you can get PCBs thinner than credit cards for
sure. I don’t know how well semiconductors hold up due to being shoved in
wallets, but maybe if the silkscreen looked cool enough, then the ICs could
be totally optional (and the subject of a SMD night)
Can go down to 0.6mm, round corners are a given. I was thinking most of the text would be milled out. Perhaps with a circuit, perhaps with copper on both sides for ridigity (will likely screw with rfid/nfc though).
All I want is a nice looking item that would signify me as VHS member, which I could use to prove my membership when needed. Not being membership administrator, I did not think that it might be too difficult as too many people may want to join VHS and get membership card. I am fairly new to VHS and I care about my membership identity yet. And I am not a fan of RFID/NFC. I also agree the design should be voted for; though, not everybody will like it probably. If the idea is to use membership card for things such as storing membership payload, opening front door and getting discounts at Lee’s, I can not do it. It would compromise current system of keyholders and regular members for if the key was on the card and every member would have one, every member would be keyholder. Plus, I probably can not afford Lee’s jeans ware even with %5 discount. Initially, I thought membership card could be laser cut.
@Neo the NFC payload would be specific to each member and used to determine whether or not they are a keyholder. This would be verified against our Membership Management System that would be used to validate status. However, at this point this is more of a future concern as our current location requires us to use pin codes for access anyway.
