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With our focus set on empowering the technologically underserved population, we created a brief persona to help identify problems and potential solutions.
Some key characteristics of the persona include:

• Uninterested in modern technology
• Wish to stay in touch with family who are far away
• Independent, not looking for help unless absolutely necessary
Our challenge here is to construct a product that is intuitive enough to be used and liked by Phyllis.

Sitting in a national hackathon, we listed out the critical constraints for the project, so as to properly define scope.

• Time (36 hours) Little time for research & Construct MVP (minimum viable product) and add features to it
• Limited hardware Gathering what we brought and scavenged from PennApps gadgets, we ended with: 1 Intel Edison board, 2 Arduinos, 1 Leap motion, 1 thermal printer, 1 Pixy camera, 1 radio module, 2 step motors
• Skills set We are a team with mixed talents of design, hardware and software. Our technical strength is web development, but relatively weak on mobile development.

With scenarios defined, we started translating them into technical details. Our principle was to make each component as modularized as possible, making collaboration all the more efficient.
As Pixy camera picks up the color of input card (each color represents a service above) and feeds the info into Edison, a corresponding service (app) residing on the Heroku server is notified. The service retrieves data from the external provider, and the server rasterizes data into printable bitmap image, sends back to Edison and the thermal printer in turn.
The whole process is of surprisingly low delay - from the moment a colored card is scanned, it takes 0.5 - 1 second for the printer to start printing.