Fortune Call: a fortune machine for China

Project 12 of 82

Areas and technologies

interactive installation
retail
jetson
local ai
qwen3
thermal printer
rp2040
lcd

January 2026

Client: Zara · China
Year: 2026
Studio: Bagel Affairs
Hardware: NVIDIA Jetson, RP2040, LCD, thermal printer
Interface: Telephone dial and two keys
AI: Qwen3 running locally, in Chinese
My part: Assembly and bring-up

Assembly of Fortune Call, a fortune-telling machine with a phone dial, a screen, a thermal printer and an AI model running on device.

Fortune Call (运势来电, "the fortune is calling") is a fortune-telling machine made for China. Visitors dial with a telephone rotary dial, the screen guides them through the reading and at the end they get their fortune printed on thermal paper. There is no cloud service behind it: a Qwen3 model runs locally on an NVIDIA Jetson.

I assembled the whole set, from the boards to the enclosure, and left it ready to run.

The dial

The interface is a phone dial and two keys. No touchscreen, no keyboard: you dial with your finger and confirm with the two yellow buttons. It is a gesture everyone recognises, and in a fortune machine the dial does half the work.

From the dial to the paper

An RP2040 reads the dial pulses and the keys, and the Jetson takes over: it interprets the query, generates the fortune with Qwen3 in Chinese and sends it to the thermal printer. The LCD marks each step, from the call to the result, so that the wait becomes part of the game.

Close-up of the LCD while the machine starts

Assembly

The work happened at the bench: building and testing the boards before closing the machine. The controllers arrived as a batch of yellow boards and were populated one by one, checking the dial, the keys and the screen against the Jetson and the printer.

Batch of freshly fabricated yellow boards

Controller board with the screen mounted and the two keys

Test bench with the Jetson, the board and the wiring

Thermal printer and power supply at the bench

The machine

Once everything was tested, the machine was closed in the white frame with its ZARA FORTUNE CALL label. Inside are the Jetson, the controller board, the dial, the printer and the power supply, packed into the same volume.