ESP32 biz card in a MUD

Cf https://hackaday.io/project/196175-yet-another-business-card

The challenge

The Hackaday 2024 Business Card challenge comes at a good time!

I’ve wanted to play on a couple of topics, around:

• Business cards: wanted to try something, business-card size, usable to prototype.
• MUD and MUSH-es: I used to play a few, but was sad to not find some working on a ESP(8266/32)
• Electronic sculptures: I had a couple of brass rods And keeping things simple. There are a couple of challenges of course along the way, but this might be an approach (hopefully) different from others.

Let’s see how this goes before July 2nd =)

MUDs on IoT ?

So .. it seems there isn’t much done for MUDs on IOT .. weird!

Still, there’s this one project http://git.savsoul.com/barry/esp8266-Mud , by Barry. Works for the ESP8266, but it seems it isn’t that straightforward for the ESP32 C3 mini I have chosen. There are memory issues, particularly on the socket side, so.. nope.

I’ll just be piggy backing on the mudserver.py file done and keep the mudpi file from the original project, to get more of a MUSH and less of a MUD, to stick with the project objectives. Not really to level-up characters on a business card, more exploring =)

I’ll try and push the code on github - https://github.com/kelu124/esp32-mud/ , and see if I can set it up in a way that allows both my rpi5 and the esp32 to use the same mud engine, leaving the mudserver bits to their respective platforms.

We still have a bit of time till the end of the contest!

Checklist

So! Committing to this challenge.

Let’s start with the WHY: well. that’s a challenge, and I’ve got a couple of things I’ve always wanted to try out:

• Sculpture, easy to assemble
• Couple of touch points
• Contains a MUD of sort
• Thin, because, well.. business case

The WHAT is easy:

• A space where people explore their contact.
• A nice looking card, electronic sculpture like
• Possibility to encase it in epoxy

The HOW around a couple of topics:

• Energy: I’ve thought NFC, Solar, .. but going for another approach definitely ;)
• Heart: ESP32 is relatively stable. There were a couple of NFC chips but I don’t have bandwidth to play with them.
• IOs: Visuals: array of leds is tough. A small OLED screen should do the trick.

Hackaday contraints:

• Wafer thin; let’s keep it thin-ish. The usb plug might be the bigger part
• Aesthetics: yeah, definitely
• Cheap: let’s go for off the shelf, aliexpress components
• Fun and games: having a toy: definitely if / with a MUD.
• Utilitarian: see the above =)

Rules:

• Form factor: around 90x50mm - fits in a pocket
• Do a bit more than traditional business card: yup
• Documenting: that’s what we do.
• Design: won’t be much design files, but documenting should do the trick.