Trading cards with e-ink displays (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Trading cards with e-ink displays (2023)

howtoware.co

424 pointsedye141 comments

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.

I don't know. I think the younger 20-somethings all have this same kind of dream, but the older people get, the more comfortable they seem hiding behind NDAs at FAANGs or staying in "stealth mode." They really don't owe anyone anything.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the younger 20-somethings.

You don't "hide behind" NDAs. Either you have one or you don't. Whatever your position is on the NDAs in general, you really shouldn't break one you accepted.

> Whatever your position is on the NDAs in general, you really shouldn't break one you accepted.

The recent OpenAI non-disparagement agreement ex-employees were forced to sign was itself covered by a non-disclosure agreement. Which current employees thus naturally had no idea about... until they were leaked to the press. Would it really have been better for these not to have been leaked?

If it's in the territory of ex employees being forced to sign something, I don't count that under NDA anymore - it's just sneaky BS. You can twist anything in some evil scheme - that doesn't mean the original thing itself is bad.

The context here is sharing general technical knowledge, not the openai internal backstabbing.

I live here too. I'm biased, but 1) this place is not full of awesome engineers, it's mostly full of overworked contractors and newbies with eighth grader syndrome. And 2) you can't just walk up to them and ask them to explain everything about their project. That's a huge security issue and if it were true it would be a lot easier to social engineer places today. Not to say that it isn't possible, but this comment paints an unproductive, idealized, and inaccurate view of the bay.

edit: it is a very cool e-ink project, and there are some cool communities like the maker faire. Reflexively reacting against the generalization

I didn't mean people who work at Uber explaining how their load-balancing works.

I meant walking up to a super cool music visualization at an outdoor art festival and they guy there happily explaining to me their entire system built out of a node flow diagram implemented on Max but adapted to visual graphics using a plugin called Vsynth.

Or going over to a friend's house and seeing their modular synth system and they happily explain to you how it works for an hour.

Just this weekend I met an amazing engineer with a street-legal steam-powered motorcycle which he patiently explained for an hour.

Yeah that makes sense. Got me wondering to what extent it’s possible with something like load balancing too. Maybe meetups don’t have to corner the market on that kind of info sharing

That doesn't seem very bay-specific, any DIYer will happily talk about their project.

Whay do u mean i called Elon he said sure cmon over we smoked weed and made a cool double decker car and drove it to Tim Apples house and he hired me to work on m5 chip. its still like that.

What is "eighth grader syndrome?"

Possible:

https://theotakubox.com/blogs/articles/chuunibyou-eighth-gra...

I'm reading it as developing a level of capability which may (or may not) be genuinely accomplished but lacks requisite perspective and humility regarding its limits. Young teens (as in the 8th grade range) are famous for displaying this, and of course capable adults find it an easy mistake to make at many points in life.

It's most aptly described as edgyism

Pretty sure that term doesn't apply here correctly fwiw. My best guess is that it means GP is saying that the devs in SF see themselves as overpowered/magical in their dev abilities. But it seems like a stretch of the meaning of this term as far as I have seen it used.

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.

Is this really better than physical cards? There are electronics here, and electronics tend to go obsolete fast. If the old one is obsolete in a year or two there was so little reuse that everyone is better off with old fashioned paper/plastic. You would have to commit to not coming up with a better model every year - but if you do that someone else will compete by coming out with the better model instead. Which is to say you can't win.

I completely agree. Thinking more along the lines of- whether or not something is better may not drive a market, people loved Tamagotchi but vanilla stuffed animals last generations... but Tamagotchi still work for many.

Something that has dirt simple utility (you have a visual que that can be rotated that indicates to staff processing thousands of people an hour that you're payed) without requiring a phone that can do all that and more maybe be generically useful.

If you try to sell something on the basis of "so they didn't add to their kilograms of plastic pass/lanyard waste", the question of whether it actually saves anything is clearly relevant.

I'm also confused why you think receipt that can be rotated is somehow a difference maker, have you ever encountered on that can't be?

> question of whether it actually saves anything is clearly relevant

Agreed. Just like re-usable plastic bags are now possibly worse than 1-time use unless they themselves are used many times.

> A receipt that can be rotated is somehow a difference maker

This is the concept behind metro bus services in many places I've experienced, the driver glances at the color of your ticket and knows it's nature and whether you can keep riding or not. Don't know if that's a difference maker for conferences.

Looking for "badgers", or a syncronized icon instead of time/date etc., possibly coming at you in many different forms (phone, paper forms, etc) seems like it might be quicker. It might also cut down on people losing their badges (they are more valuable to them) and requiring re-prints ... which happens a lot, this is grasping.

Don't forget the e-waste aspect... You can recycle paper easily, but several rare earth metals and e-ink all mashed together are much more difficult, and require a lot more energy to produce.

Honestly, this is exactly the kind of overconsumption that got us to where we are. I don't care what someone's favorite emoji is, quite frankly, and I don't think it's worth strip mining the Congo just to do a Neat Thing. Use a printer, do it for the sake of your grandchildren's future.

And then place a few crayons at the venue if you care about the smiley.

It's not just paper, perhaps at least run the numbers? Though I completely agree it's likely more environmentally costly.

My initial thought process evolved from coming back from yet another conference, and tossing yet another lanyard (colorful plastic, metal clips) and plastic covering into the garbage. I have done this probably around 50 times. So think replacing 100-200 of these for an academic, far, far more for con staff, sales vendors, etc.

One of the hurdles you would have to overcome is convincing all of the conferences to go with these reusable e-ink badges.

Let's say all the organizers are convinced...why not use a common, non-electronic badge instead, since you have everyone agreeing to a common standard anyway? Perhaps something simple where the conference organizers can print out a paper slip (recycled paper even!) that you insert so they get some customization.

> One of the hurdles you would have to overcome is convincing all of the conferences to go with these reusable e-ink badges.

This is the only thing that matters buisiness-wise, its what I'd expect people who frequent HN do routinely, pitch. It doesn't have to be logical, fun, environmentally friendly, it just has to make it to their level of control. I've seen very illogical things become "standard" with little or no questioning for why it is now this way for no other reason than someone was very good at expressing "this is the way it is and should be" (i.e. they where very good at BS).

There is still the main purpose of those things: Verifying people are allowed to enter.

That is (aside from sponsors, who want their logo there) a reason why it looks as it looks and having it somewhat different from event to event.

A shared programmable batch would require scanning them while entering each room, which creates bottlenecks at doors and more effort as each door needs staff and tech (and as soon as you have staff and tech at each door you can also provide all information there, thus the gain of being able to share information into the badge is gone) and you get to privacy issues.

And then half the badges people bring are broken and most participanta didn't ever have one/lost it/forgot it.

I feel like the paper slips solve those problems already, in the same way they are solved today with single-use plastic badges.

The plastic ones can already be forged, switching to paper wouldnt make it any easier as long as you don't publicize what it will look like in advance.

I'm not putting steaming poo on my badge, it's the concept of customization that's easily shared- "For the social let's all use our lab's logo, and tonight we can use our student org's logo, and tomorrow for the society meetup we could put a picture of the organism we study". Conversation starters (perhaps I do want to put poo on my badge) in what is a social event with many rapidly-changing sub-contexts. Sticker and pin collecting is fun though, so maybe not such a compelling use-case.

Smaller meetings provide markers for name-tags all the time, that's different from the conference-provided ID I'm required to wear in a conference of 6k+ people.

Can you really put a price on fun? No fun allowed? Why do we even need playing cards in the first place that's a waste of good paper.

I get the argument here but you really should keep things in perspective. E-waste is a real and massive problem. This is a tiny tiny project it is neither here nor there.

Say it blows up and becomes extremely popular (it won't)? Like any other piece of electronics solutions will be available. Cross that bridge when you get there.

The fun and education aspect is in fact better than physical cards and worthwhile.

Also if we really think deeply about it this project may end up being better for the environment not worse.

Make it hackable and they'll probably be around forever.

I know of CyberBadge from Poland, which is making a very primitive version of what you're describing. They don't have a screen, just an array of programmable led lights. People use them at events. https://cyberbadge.net/

Cool. Badges, commemorative pins, small tradable items are mainstays at cons, conferences etc., their market doesn't need to be created, it's their to be fed.

So make this type of thing work across time and you have created value to someone, which means a marketable product, at least in the Slashdot sense of ?, ?, 3... profit!.

Have you heard of our lord and saviour the Pimoroni Badger? https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/badger-2040?variant=39752... I have one and it's awesome. They upgraded it recently with wifi: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/badger-2040-w?variant=405...

They have similarly-shaped stuff in color too, like the Tufty https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/tufty-2040?variant=400369... and the Inky https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-frame-5-7?variant=40...

This! Now make them required at conferences (easily done because professional societies), someone sell the service. We have to pay $600 just to go to present our papers, make it cost less by $50 if you come with your own.

I for one welcome our new badger overlords.

This looks really neat. Now I'm tempted to see if I can get one and have a way to render a conference schedule on it. :D

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?

I imagine:

Hardware side: custom card frames and boards.

Software side: cards with custom images and games.

IIUC (and I haven't RTFA but from my recollection of my conversations with Jonah around that same time frame) there is not really a game yet, it's more of a platform, with "trading" intended to be a possible feature of some games.

:wave:

Yes, still no game, I spent the last year delivering the crowdfunded devkits.

This is a fantastic idea, Jonah, and I hope you see it gain widespread adoption!

Have you connected with folks like board game geek or other groups that might be a way to shift towards a large platform?

I've done a little bit of that, but not as much as I should. I took it to a boardgame convention and a GDC event, but not much came from it. If anyone has introductions or advice there, I'd appreciate it.

Yes, all cards will be like this soon. So if you wish to keep your rare baseball card collection, you'll have to continue to pay your subscription price. If you miss a payment, you might be temporarily locked out of the collection, but repeated missed payments risk the collection being deleted entirely.

Great. the DIVX(tm) of collectible cards. I don't foresee a large uptake of this.

I'm hoping to monetize the Shadow Realm

Hi, Wyldcard creator here, thanks to HowToWare for the interview :)

The cards can store data, and I imagine that things which happen to the card during a game leave a lasting impact, which is carried from game to game. The cards grow and change over time, and so when you trade one, you're trading an entire legacy :D

That sounds more like a legacy style board game than an actual trading card game.

Which seems to me like the better implementation of this technology, anything else due to its digital nature just feels like it is going to be exploited making any value disappear completely.

I think this would be an amazing idea for a legacy style game, especially since it opens up the possibility of resetting the game and it really simplifies picking up and playing later.

But I really don't think it will work as a TCG.

Ah yeah. TCG is just a quick way to explain it to people so they get what I'm going for. I personally dislike the whole "rarity" aspect of TCGs, though it was fun when I was a kid. Living Card Games like Netrunner are more fun to play IMO.

My elevator pitch usually goes something like: MTG meets Yu-gi-oh meets Pokemon (the RPG) meets Tamagotchi.

No Sabacc?

Tamagotchi is the best metaphor. Take a look at this old school BBS game "The Pit" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK69uCBtI18

Could you do a janky version of "Street Fighter" where your dude (and assistant/second character) both had permanent stats + inventory + needing to "rest" or "heal over time" to recover after the battle? Same, but it's more of an RPG "character card + inventory card" vs. "opponent character + opponent inventory"?

The concept of 1x$100 base, and 4x$15 playing cards seems approachable (vis: MTG booster packs).

Definitely look to have some sort of replaceable / lay-in play mat (see the little cards on this toy: https://www.amazon.com/VTech-80-178200-Drill-Learn-Toolbox/d... ). You could have a "Street Fighter" 2v2 playmat, or "Texas Hold-em" flop/turn/river mat. "Scan the QR Code, bluetooth connect to the base, load the 'game' into the device's memory", and then you're phone-free (forever) to negotiate between the base and the cards.

You're "missing" some sort of cover/door on the cards themselves (eg: configure the base station for texas hold'em, and how do you "shuffle" the two player cards w/o revealing their values to others?

Actually, what you should do is to put some sort of pin-pattern on the top that can be accessed from the front or the back (eg: four pins "as rivets" on left and right sides, two pins on top/bottom), so you could "load" or "shuffle" the card face up or face down.

Face-Up + buttons 1/2/3 => the display changes, you take your action, etc.

Face-Down + buttons 1/2/3 => the display changes, but the result is "hidden until revealed".

Another useful tool would be to allow some sort of spinners/selectors on the "cards" themselves (vis: el-grande's spinners: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/105293/el-grande ).

Being able to have some sort of dumb switches or a rotating selector on the cards themselves that are then "read" by the base station will let people do their thinking and take their turns "in their own hand" is super powerful (eg: let people select punch/kick/block on the cards in their hands vs. having to "dock" the card and only then being able to select punch/kick/block) is super-important to enable a smooth-flowing game instead of a novelty toy.

Overall, there's tons of cool options with it!

> Tamagotchi is the best metaphor.

One of the ideas I’ve been chasing for a decade as a personal project is a set of figures, not unlike SkyLanders or the Disney Infinity figures. They would operate in a Pokémon-like game but retain memories of their interactions I haven’t ever quite gotten it done, but it remains one of my favorite projects to tackle.

Consider Button Men ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/226312/button-men-beat-p... and the original https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17/button-men https://web.archive.org/web/20050205124221/http://beatpeople... )

These were originally implemented as buttons that you could pin on your shirt. There was a game convention long ago where sometimes you'd find two random people wearing them have a "hey! Let's play a game" moment since it also advertised playing the game. Break out the dice that you've already got, sit down and play in a minute or two (with no weird rules you everything ran real fast).

Likewise, you could have the "this is the game" clipped on one's shirt and then playing a digital game with your selected character.

Just replace the visible buttons with low-power bluetooth beacons...

Leave it to the capitalists to insinuate that something that doesn't make you money has no value, no matter how much fun and entertainment it provides to people.

I never made that insinuation.

But "value" is critical to a TCG when the first word is "trading". Otherwise what are you trading?

Otherwise, you just have a board game with cards (which exists). Which is fine! But that isn't a TCG.

I'm aware that mentioning this tends to get you crucified on HN, but making something like this fun is a good use for blockchain technology.

Blockchains create digital scarcity, and in fact, are the only decentralized way to have digital scarcity. So having the "cards" represent tokens on e.g. Ethereum would be a clever way to do that, I'm sure the processors can provide a secp256k1 signature, and the rest is read-only. I'd suggest not keeping your playing cards on the same wallet as other valuable stuff though.

I think some of the deep antipathy which certain commenters on this site exhibit towards the blockchain, is a hangover from the proof of work days. Sure, Bitcoin still uses it, but Ethereum doesn't. So it's decentralized digital scarcity, which is a useful property, at a reasonable environmental price.

There's plenty left to criticize about some uses of Ethereum, sure, but this wouldn't be one of those uses.

Why choose this approach over a traditional centralized database?

Because you have to pay to keep a traditional centralized database running, you have to trust the people running it, and when those people don't want to run it anymore, it's gone.

With a blockchain, you pay to modify it, so moving stuff around costs cybercoins, but even if no one wants to mint blocks anymore, you can still read your copy, which has your cards in it. And in that event, if you want to move stuff around, you still can, because anyone can set up a validator, even if they're the only one interested in keeping it going.

But I think this is reasonably unlikely to happen to any of the top blockchains on a reasonable timeframe. Whereas a game company shutting off its servers is virtually assured.

> decentralized digital scarcity, which is a useful property

Complete loss of control over your game's ecosystem is, in fact, not a useful property.

I don't see how you're deriving that quality from the suggestion. Losing complete control over your game's ecosystem is not an essential property of the technology I'm suggesting.

Perhaps if you explain what you mean, I'll understand the point you're attempting to make.

See adjacent reply

in what way would that loss of control be complete?

the contract developer would still have knobs and levers for adjusting rarity, issuing new cards, etc.

they wouldn't control the secondary market, but that's no different from Magic The Gathering or Pokemon or good old fashioned baseball cards.

If you, exclusively, can control the rarity and issue new cards then it's hardly a decentralized market and there's no reason not do just make it a centralized system.

It's still a decentralized market, it's one with a single issuer, as many buyers as want cards, and as many sellers as wish to sell. Much like, for instance, Magic the Gathering. Not a lot of point in selling rare playing cards when they aren't rare, so sure, you could set up a token contract where anyone can issue as many "cards" with whatever properties they'd like. But that wouldn't produce a fun game.

I've personally never been drawn to the rare collectible genre of game, but they're quite popular, one of the services offered is balancing rarity and power. People who like these games enjoy the lottery aspect of buying a sight-unseen pack, opening it, and hoping to score a rare card, they like participating in an aftermarket, and they like putting together decks which other people don't have. All of which can be auditably provided using a blockchain, without having to check for counterfeits, and with players able to confirm that a card is actually scarce just by examining the state of the contract.

There are two reasons not to just make it a centralized system. One I addressed in another comment, the other is that with a decentralized system, it's possible to get the same properties as a physical collectible playing card game.

Namely: the creators control the properties of cards, how many are issued, and enjoy the profits of the first sale. But after that sale, the cards/token belong to whomever purchased them, and that person can sell them to whomever they like.

It's also possible to attach royalties to additional sales, or even retain the right to destroy tokens, but I would advise against this on business grounds, since those decisions would be unpopular ones for customers and players.

Of course, a centralized system would allow the issuers to confiscate the assets at any time, or forbid their transfer, or change the arrangement so that people are lured in with the premise that they can freely resell their cards, and then impose some cut of the resale price ex post facto. Plus if the company goes out of business, and shuts down the database and servers, that's the end of all that, your supposedly scarce bits are now useless.

So if your definition of losing control involves not being able to abuse your customers in that way, I can see why a centralized database might be preferable.

If it doesn't, then a centralized database is clearly inferior in every way that matters, for this application. Of course, someone starting with a thesis that blockchains are useless by definition, is going to begin with the conclusion, and work their way backward looking for reasons that conclusion is true.

Why is digital scarcity a good thing? Why is scarcity at all a good thing? Is there any reason for this, outside of trying to sell them at an ever higher price? And how does sharing a read-only e-ink card benefit over a regular card, or a card with an NFC tag in it?

I get the feeling people think because things are scarce already, scarcity is good. but... it really isn't. outside of a store-of-value, there is no real benefit to it, is there?

Trading can be fun, but it’s pointless if you could just download anything onto your card. Pokémon with a GameShark is just a totally different experience.

The guy who made magic the gathering made a game called Keyforge, every deck sold at retail has a unique selection of cards in it. You do not get to mix and match your own ingredients to play the game.

Very unique idea, very unique feeling, I still dont even know how it is mass produced actually... Kind of mediocre game to me, but thats just personal taste. It is special enough that any board gamer should give it a play at least a couple times to feel it