Minting Cosmic Coins for Lord Huron's Cosmic Selector

Having worked with Lord Huron three times now on the Follow The Emerald Star geofenced listening campaign, the Long Lost Seance teaser, and the Your Other Life player, I couldn’t help but notice a teaser video for their new album, The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1, go up at the beginning of the year. This video featured an otherworldly jukebox named the Cosmic Selector and, by habit, I immediately registered the domain cosmicselector.com. Now, I wasn’t sure if they were going to hire me again (and I wasn’t trying to hold the domain for ransom) but I had a feeling this might be the name of the album and the domain could prove to be a valuable asset for an upcoming marketing campaign. I would give it up, if asked.

Flash forward to April 1, of all days, and a call was scheduled to discuss the “Cosmic Selector.” I quickly dropped the secret: I had already registered cosmicselector.com and we had a good laugh about it. Naturally, we discussed the jukebox (more on the later) and there was an existing thought to potentially make some physical coins but the purpose of said coins wasn’t clear. The answer was to not look too far. If the website was going to be the “jukebox,” the coins should be the currency to play it. So, we would set out to produce unique physical coins which could be used to play selections from the new album via a digital jukebox.

Now, I usually try to do one thing I haven’t done before on each project (this is how I self-educate) but this experience required many new “firsts” for me:

• Producing a physical asset
• Using NFC technology so a mobile device could interact with the coin
• Minting coins to a database and writing unique coin URLs to NFCs
• Figuring out simple coin packaging

And that’s just the coins. The jukebox would also have a series of new problems I would need to traverse. For the sake of this dev blog, we’ll stick to the coins for now.

3D Printed Coins

Once we knew the direction of the campaign, we jumped on a quick follow up call about potential physical coin solutions. This included super pricey metal NFC challenge coins but… our goal was to find an affordable solution that would allow us to get these into as many fans’ hands as possible. I recalled that my local barista, Josh, had recently purchased a 3D printer he was raving about and while I’m not a fan of plastic, I wondered if it would be a viable solution for our NFC coins. So, I left that call with some homework. I would order a 3D printer and look into plastic as a potential affordable solution. We also set a deadline. We would distribute these coins at the end of May at the back to back Red Rock shows, which has turned into a fan pilgrimage, and the accompanying merch bazaar.

48 Hours of Prototyping

I knew our time was limited to get this done so as soon as my 3D printer showed up I got to work learning how it functioned and attempting to prototype a coin. I went with a Bambu Studio A1 mini because it was affordable and I read it was user friendly. I began by sizing my Blender workspace so I was modeling in millimeters and then I made sure the printer was printing at the right size. An easy experiment was to create a quarter shaped disc in Blender, print it on the Bambu, and then compare it to a real quarter. All good.

I think a good prototype shows off what is possible visually so I aimed to create a design which had a simple arcade token motif on one side and a natural scene relief on the other. That’s when I learned about nozzles.

A 3D printer kinda works like frosting a cake. You have nozzles of different diameters which can create designs of various levels of detail by extruding plastic. The higher the detail, the longer and more expensive the print. We found ourselves in a rather complicated position because our coin design needed to be both detailed and small. The prototype I created was a bit larger and modeled with a 0.4mm nozzle but I knew we would probably end up using 0.2mm. In addition to getting the details of a two-sided design right, we also needed a spot for the NFC sticker which would live within. I experimented with all sorts of constructions and learned a lot about the pros and cons of different printing strategies. Naturally, with every decision I made, I had to also consider how a 3rd party printer vendor might handle the print. It’s a lot to unpack over one weekend.

One thing I like about plastic is that it comes in a great range of colors (kinda like vinyl variations) and I started thinking about how coins could be different colors and carry stories from different dimensions. Should a coin look like the emerald star? Maybe a coin might have a bit of moss on it because it was buried in the swamp? Maybe it should be void of color? Maybe we sent them to fans unpainted and encouraged them to design their own coins. My fiancé, Anne Blenker, hand-painted one of the prototypes to simulate this idea.

Finally, I did a bit of thinking about simple packaging which would secure the coin and also provide a bit of instructions on how it worked. I went with a simple coin envelope with The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1 logo printed on the front.

Needless to say, it was a lot of thinking for 48 hours and all of this was presented in the most verbose client email ever. Seriously. We all jumped on another call, and rightfully so, set our sights on avoiding plastic for a higher quality material. So, I turned off my 3D printer and got back to work on the jukebox. Until…

Printing Returns

Two weeks before Red Rocks, we realized any alternate solutions we were planning would not arrive on time and 3D printing was officially back on. Panic. I stopped working on the jukebox and jumped right back into the coins.

Since my initial prototyping session, Tony Wilson had come up with a lovely design for the coin but it was in 2D. So, I quickly got to turning it into a 3D relief design. Tony’s design was a lot smaller at 40mm x 40mm so I had to consider which elements could stay and which had to go based on 0.2mm nozzle detail. I also finalized the coin construction to use a bowl and lid method. The bottom of the design and edge side would be printed like a bowl which the NFC could sit within. The top of the design would be designed as a lid which would be fit into the bowl and glued on top. This should help speed up the assembly process. I also placed an order for a Cosmic Selector logo stamp at StampMaker.com as well as an order for simple coin envelopes from Amazon.

It then came down to getting the coins printed. We found a partner in Scott from Stand It Up. He said the best way to print the quantity we were aiming for in the time we had remaining was to use resin. So, that’s what we did. Scott’s team printed it quickly and the coins were set to arrive the Saturday before the Wednesday show via Fedex for assembly. However, my weekend Fedex guy is notorious for not attempting to get in my building and, sure enough, the delivery was missed. Of course, Monday was Memorial Day, which means the coins would not arrive until Tuesday, the day before the first Red Rocks show. I began to realize I may in fact be hand delivering these coins to Denver.

Minting Coins and Writing NFCs

While waiting for those coins to arrive, I developed a workflow for minting coins and writing the unique coin URL to an NFC using the Web NFC API and an Android phone. Unlike most NFC campaigns which use a single URL, our NFCs required a different unique URL for every coin because we wanted to track the type of coin it was and whether or not it was “spent” to play a selection on the jukebox. Using the Web NFC API, I could check to see if a NFC already had a Cosmic Coin URL associated with it and if not, mint a new coin in our coin database and write the new Cosmic Coin URL to the waiting NFC. Check out this separate dev blog for more on that workflow.

Spray Paint

On Tuesday, the coins finally arrived and we quickly realized the gold resin was much too transparent. (Something we could have remedied with a bit more time.) That’s when Anne made the call to spray paint them gold, which is a common solution in 3D printing. For the Red Rocks coins, we just grabbed a can of gold spray paint from Ace Hardware but in the future we would use Montana Goldchrome for a nice metallic shine. So, there we were, spray painting these coins in our apartment parking lot 24 hours before they would be handed to fans in Denver. A lot of neighbors asked what we were up to but they just sorta figured we were creating next year’s Mardi Gras throws really early.

To The Mountains

With no time left to ship these coins, Anne and I woke up at 3am in New Orleans to catch a 5:40am flight to Denver. That flight got us to Denver with enough time to deliver these to the Tubb’s Bazaar near downtown Denver. We made it to the bazaar and were stamping the final coin envelopes an hour or two before the doors opened. Management had the genius idea to hide these throughout the bazaar and merch offerings. Soon, word started to trickle out that fans were finding coins in their hoodies, at the bar, and behind plants. Then, someone realized the coin could be scanned. That’s when something interesting happened. I had added a statement telling fans not to share their coin url and they were such rule followers that they also didn’t share the cosmicselector.com domain. Honestly, I was pretty proud of how secretive they were and figured it was only a matter of time before the domain leaked.

Coin Security

As soon as the coins were in fans’ hands, my brain started to worry about the security of the coin URLs. Even though the fans were being very secretive about their unique coin URLs, I was worried about someone else screwing it up: Google. Google Search is VERY good about indexing somewhat hidden URLs and I had this concern that all of the unique coin URLs would show up on Google and bad actors could play other fans’ coins. So, I quickly turned off search engine indexing in robots.txt for the entire website and that seemed to do the trick.

A Night at Red Rocks

Feeling like we did everything we could, we got ready for a night at Red Rocks and enjoyed some concessions on the terrace. We had the loveliest night hearing Strange Trails from front to back. Then, the band performed some songs from the new album. At the end of one of the songs, Ben reached into his pocket and threw some coins out to the fans. It was surreal.

I got to see Ben and management after the show and we celebrated the fact that we got it done. Henry (from management) told me he dropped all the coins in a puddle at some point, adding to the chaos of the coins’ journey to fans’ hands. I then turned my attention to the jukebox.

Oh yeh, we have to build a jukebox…