Premise

Netflix tasked Deeplocal with creating a promotion for Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings TV show. We created a smart tissue box that listened along to the show and automatically popped open whenever a touching moment happened in the show. A total of 10 boxes were sent to various social media influencers.

My Role

The primary challenge here was a small budget; to keep engineering costs low, the project utilized all off-the-shelf parts. The box consisted of a Raspberry Pi for audio processing connected to a control system based on a Teensy microcontroller. I designed what was essentially a “carrier” PCB to which I soldered a bunch of components and pre-built breakout boards from Adafruit and Sparkfun. The board included a couple different power regulators, a USB-C charge controller for the battery and Raspberry Pi, and other various passives and connectors. I wrote firmware to communicate with the audio-processing frontend and to control various LEDs, the box-opening mechanism and other various features of the box. I also did a lot of creative concepting and mechanical prototyping.