Applied Gadgets · Intel Edison 2015

Pandora

A wooden box that pulls faces from old photographs and sends them to the cloud.

Concept

Inspired by the Revenge TV show’s Infinity Box — a physical repository of memories — Pandora is a collector’s box that digitizes the faces from photographs placed inside it. Slip in an old photo; the box extracts every face and uploads it to the cloud where it’s accessible from any device.

The goal was a finished, polished object: not a breadboard in a shoebox, but something that looked like it belonged on a shelf.

Electronics First

The two hardest technical pieces went first: getting live snapshots from the webcam, and sending extracted faces over WiFi to a cloud service.

Laptop screen showing live webcam feed being transmitted to a Node.js web service — First milestone — streaming live video over WiFi to a Node.js web service running locally. Once this worked, I added OpenCV face detection to send only extracted faces.

With that working, I installed OpenCV on the Intel Edison, implemented face detection and cropping, and wired up the full pipeline: photo in → face detected → cropped face uploaded to Azure-hosted Node.js service → accessible from any browser.

Intel Edison connected to a breadboard with buttons and LEDs wired up — Edison on breadboard. I needed a trigger button (camera shutter), a reset button, a progress LED for OpenCV computation and WiFi transfer, and an RGB LED indicating good vs. bad memory state.

Hand-drawn sketch of the box interaction: photo goes in, face comes out to the cloud — Interaction sketch. The entire surface interaction is just: open box, place photo, press button.

Building the Box

I used InkScape to design laser-cut plywood sides with box joints — interlocking tabs that snap together without glue, relying entirely on friction. The cut files went straight to a laser cutter.

Laser-cut plywood panels laid out showing the box joint tab patterns — Laser-cut panels. The tab-and-slot geometry was drawn in InkScape and cut from plywood.

Single assembled box side showing the reset button hole and LED aperture — One wall assembled. The button hole and LED aperture are cut into the panel — the joints hold it all without glue.

Back of assembled unfinished box showing port cutouts — Back panel with port cutouts for USB and power. Labels laser-etched directly into the wood.

Back of stained box showing port labels showing through stain — After staining — the laser-etched labels show through the stain cleanly.

Finishing

A water-based wood stain over the whole box. Scrap pieces of wood were shaped and fitted into the button holes as pegs.

Inside of stained box before Edison installation — Interior after staining, before the Edison was fitted.

Side of box with wooden peg button and green LED installed — Stained side panel with wooden peg trigger and green progress LED.

Open box interior showing collected mementos and photographs including Hugh Jackman — Interior dressed as the Infinity Box — old photographs and mementos stored alongside newly captured faces.

Stack

Intel Edison — main compute, runs OpenCV face detection
OpenCV — face detection and extraction
Node.js / Azure — cloud service receiving, storing, and serving face images
InkScape + laser cutter — box panels and joints