I recently took an x-ray of a card, might be interesting to some of you as well:

Doing that can reveal a whole bunch of interesting patterns. I was repairing something on a circuit board once and was trying to figure out the wiring. Trying to get more light, I shone my phone’s flashlight at it. At some point I suddenly realized that the circuit board lets a bit of light through. I realized that, at least for some of the board, I could shine a flashlight onto the other side and see pretty exactly how the circuit was laid out. It also looked really, really cool.
Peak mildly interesting, bravo
Electrical Engineer here. Pretty sure the slit is to break up the metal in the card so it won’t interfere with NFC.
If you look at an NFC antenna, it’s a big coil of wire. It’s energized by an oscillating magnetic field that passes through it. Faraday’s Law dictates that when a magnetic field oscillates, an electric field will form around it. This electric field generates a current in the antenna that powers the NFC chip.
In a metal card, the current will flow in the card instead and draw energy away from the NFC chip. This slit blocks that current flow so that the current flows in the antenna instead.
Any reason it’s a staircase instead of just a simple. Straight line?
I believe that minimizes capacitance. My question is why diagonal at all. Maybe it helps with adhesion during the manufacturing process?
Capacitance between turns, specifically. Provides e-field shielding too.
It’s an antenna & it needs to be a certain length - making it a bit gay just adds enough pizazz (length) and it’s the ez thing to do from a designers pov.
So metal
Interesting.
What does it do when you shine the light on the card numbers?The account starts reporting unexpected transactions.
Fascinating.
Well, the card numbers become illuminated
lol
Is the squiggly line an antenna?
It connects the chip to the NFC antenna that runs around the rest of the card.
I thought so at first, but since this card is metal I’m assuming it has something to do with adding the chip during manufacturing.





