HackGT 2014: The start of a great southern hacking tradition
I was on site with our "Internet of Things" intern and electrical engineering student Steven Xing at Georgia Tech over the weekend for their first major collegiate hackathon: HackGT. We brought with us 40 IoT sensor kits, 40 Intel Edison devices and a number of prizes including a CrazyFlie micro-drone and several Basis fitness watches. For a "first time event," HackGT attracted a large list of major tech sponsors and over $60,000 in total prizes for participants - quite a strong turn-out!
Registration got off to a start on Friday with students bussing in from a variety of local schools and flying in from as far away as Colorado.
Pretty soon the auditorium was full and pitches from a variety of sponsors including SendGrid and Twilio began. Mashery was on site doing double-duty for both Intel IoT technologies in the form of Intel Edison and Mashery's API Network evangelism.
Once the pitches were done, teams formed up and the hacking got started. Mashery began interviewing qualified student teams to receive Intel Edison boards. Given the limited supply of devices and large number of student developers, only the most serious hardware hackers got access to devices and sensor kits. The results were impressive.
Teams who decided to build using Mashery APIs were awarded some of our signature black "GET /Mashery" shirts. This team, Cherry Picks, included Christina Heinich, Julia Eng, Chris Watts and Rohan Ahuja and wound up using the Mashery BestBuy API to create a product for helping people decide which electronic gadgets to buy.
On the more creative end of the spectrum was this "Fog Column" 3D projector which a group of students built to generate live videos inside a container crafted from Amazon shipping boxes.
Here is the projector in action.
As a fun side-show to the actual hacking itself, I ran a series of 6 min-challenges which developers could solve by answering tricky questions using Mashery API calls. Each large room had it's own challenge and a total of 72 students participated over the course of the weekend. Winners received a Basis watch. Judson Frampton was one of them.
Throughout the event, students came by the Mashery booth to get pointers on Python, Android, Ruby on Rails and Angular.js development from our mentors.
Intel Edison was a massive hit, students (including the Sign ++ team pictured above) came up with some extremely creative projects making use of Arduino and hand-gestures to translate sign language into text in real time. Payam Ghobadpour, Kelley Sheffield, Andrew Thieck and Madeleyne Vaca were the students making up this team.
Sign ++ went through multiple prototyping stages starting like this...
And winding up like this.
After two days of hacking, the teams assembled to show off their projects, of which there were over 100.
Team Syncsp.in built a fascinating real-time Node.js application using the Beats Music Platform. This application ran across browsers and mobile handsets and allowed DJs to track the excitement of the audience based on how much they danced during the music (via the phone accelerometer). Team members included Liam Sargent, Dawson Botsford, Tim Hyon and Ian Macalinao.
Team Crowd Computing with Adam Yost and Jonathan Egbert created a platform for running Hadoop tasks using Intel Edison devices.
Team KINA's (Andrew Feng, Jake Walsh, Richard Ho, Chi-Kan Cheung) application made creative use of Intel Edison in combination with an Edison box to demonstrate an air-typing mechanism using wearable sensors.
Team HomeHacker created a home automation solution using a combined mobile phone and door lock powered by Intel Edison (Thomas Mezaros and Harsha Nori).
Calla Carter won a red Mashery shirt for her perseverance, she lost her voice (and team) and still managed to build an entire application called "Who to Hoot" using the Best Buy API.
Team Smelectric Blanket (Amy Shu, Christopher Jwang, Liuxizi Xu) created a fancy electric blanket using Intel Edison and the IoT Sensor Kit which allows users to manage their temperature with a combined mobile application.
Sruti Modekurty presented TempAlert (with Edison), an application to help avoid accidentally leaving infants and animals in overheating cars.
Cherry Picks with their app on the judging floor.
Team PickMeUp with Kevin Jasieniecki and Keagan MccClelland built an application using Mashery's JamBase API to send an UBER cab to transport folks showing signs of sadness to a nearby concert to cheer them up.
Finally, once all the judging was done - eager attendees migrated to the main auditorium to see the results of the final sessions.
HackGT was a great event for Mashery, PickMeUp (who used JamBase) won the entire event including tens of thousands of dollars in prizes.
Syncsp.in won the Mashery award for best use of a Mashery API, in this case, the Beats Platform.
Team Sign++ won the best use of Intel technology award for their sign language and gesture interpreting glove.
Mashery and Intel had a fantastic event and look forward to next years HackGT!
