
Wearable Husky Cards
Reimagining the student ID card
A group of team members and I were discussing with each other what problem we would like to tackle involving Northeastern University's campus. We started to talk about how we found taking our ID's out of our wallets or phone was sometimes tedious and annoying if we wanted to enter a building on campus or pay for food. Sometimes, people would hold up lines at kiosks because they keep their ID's in their bags and have to scavenge through them. One reason we concluded was the cause of the annoyance of using ID's sometimes to perform certain tasks is how the ID is held on person. Northeastern University students are given lanyards and ID holders we are meant to have worn on our neck at all times, but students quickly find this annoying or unfashionable to wear. Our team then thought about how if the RFID chips in our student IDs were modular and there were multiple form factors to put the chips in, then maybe this would allow for students to keep their ID chips in more fashionable and accessible forms.
Keychain Design Brainstorm
We brainstormed and sketched out various ways we imagined a keychain would have a removable chip, including a clamping mechanism or a snap-fit feature. We ultimately decided to move forth with a screw like design where a user would need to twist a cap tight to keep the RFID chip secure.
Below is a video demonstrating how to install and remove the modular RFID chip in our keychain. We designed it so that the cap of the keychain wasn't super easy to remove unless someone used something thin like a coin to pry it open.
In addition to a keychain, we thought of making a bracelet to prototype how a modular RFID chip might interact and be housed in one. I had my first exposure to the technology of SLA printing with flexible resin with this project, seeing that a pliable object can be manufactured from a 3 D printer. It was insightful to
3D Print Polishing
The keychains that were printed were high resolution, but not high enough to not feel the layer lines. So I decided to polish some of the 3D prints by sanding with nail polish remover, acetone, and using high grit sand paper.