A 3D-Printed Business Card Embosser

It would be interesting to try to have actual registration so that the embossed design can interact with the printed copy rather that just being an arbitrary background decoration.

The way I understand your comment is you could have a scene or objects printed on a card, then line up an embossed design over the print to create depth or imprint specific areas of the print creating various effects. That would be interesting

You could have a detent on the edge of the platen for a consistent starting position.

also a tool that generates the emboss pattern based on the design of the card. so that for example a logo on the card gets embossed.

or the text in 3d, like credit cards used to be

I think that was not done by embossing but by "3d printing" on the business card directly.

I don't think I'm misremembering, but the back side of the card had recesses of the characters, so it was in fact embossed (in the UK at least).

You mean business or credit card? Credit Cards I believe was embossing, you had the negative of the numbers on the back. They did that because before you had electronic card readers, merchant were taking credit card payments by making a carbon copy of the credit card number on the invoice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter

I don’t know what you mean. The technique of stamping the numbers on credit cards was literally called embossing.

Here is a video of a desktop scale embosser used for just that purpose: https://youtu.be/5ZQHSsFnACs?si=DWwgTScwl5HXkwGP

The part where the embossing daisy wheel is shown is at 18:10.

Here are machines used at an industrial scale: https://www.maticagroup.com/technologies/embossers/

They are nevertheless called “embossers”.

I'm in Estonia, and my bank issues debit and credit cards that are definitely embossed.

The embossed numbers were used to transfer the details quickly and reliably. A roller would apply pressure to press special paper onto upraised letters and numbers. The seller would hand write the amount and the buyer would sign. Two copies were made simultaneously (carbon impregnated paper) and separated and a copy kept by each party.

Its a far cry from paying by bonk and your phone beeping a few seconds later to indicate your bank has already registered the transaction!

I think it should be relatively straightforward to set up something like that with build123d[1]. You can load the emboss pattern from an SVG and project it on the surface of a cylinder with `project_faces()`[2]. Some positive/negative extrusion and some added keyholes and you're done.

[1] https://build123d.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

[2] https://build123d.readthedocs.io/en/latest/direct_api_refere...

i thought about that, but i think doing that to cardboard is more likely to cut the letters. you can't really make the patterns to narrow to think. although you could emboss an outline of the text

unrelated, but that's almost surprising. austrian banks stopped issuing embossed cards years ago. is anyone in estonia still using that feature?