When the pandemic came in March 2020,

I took the opportunity to finally start a project I had been wanting to do for over a year.

But it needs some context.

Every day, to get to school, I would skate to the train, pick up my board and get on. To get on the train though, I would need to tap my Ventra card-- an NFC-enabled card that gets Chicagoans onto trains and buses. If you're a Chicago Public Schools student, your ID card is also your Ventra Card, which is nice, but it still meant that every time I got to the train, I had my board in one arm, and another arm scrambling to take out my wallet/ID to tap it so I could get on the train.

It always had me thinking, there has to be a better way.

In 2019, I thought of it-- a ring, something always on me, that I would never need to find, so I could just fist-bump the turnstyle and get in.

It seemed like the perfect idea, but I never had the time. Suddenly, everyone had a lot of time. So I followed and adapted some guides and did some research to figure out you can actually melt down the Ventra cards with nail polish remover-- a process you can see timelapsed in the video-- to get just the NFC antenna and chip.

Once that's done, I made a ring mold using 3D printed parts, and was able to resolder the NFC antenna and chip around it and solder so that when I eventually coated the ring interior part in resin using the mold I made, it would stay in place--with the diameter of my finger effectively acting as the antenna.

This project was a fun time, and helped me dig deeper into:

• Electrical engineering
• The science of NFC and how to properly build an antenna
• 3D printing

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