Chickening Out At Intel Seattle IoT Roadshow
Seattle's Intel IoT Hackathon on February 11th and 12th featured Team Chicken Tender with members Colin Lesage, Mike Gee and Jacqueline Peltier built a smart chicken coop integrating Weather Underground API data. Chicken Tender took home 2nd place overall along with best use of Mashery APIs.
Over 140 developers joined us this week at UW Startup Hall for a two day "Internet of Things" hackathon being sponsored and organized by Intel and BeMyApp. Who would possibly show up for a mid-week hackathon? It turns out a large number of people (and some very flexible companies like Cyanogen, who sent entire teams). I spent two days with developers helping them get up and running with Intel Edison and Intel Mashery APIs and overall had a great time.
At this particular event, I thought it would be fantastic to talk to developers (who were provided with Intel Edison devices along with sensors for light, temperature, sound and several others) about how the Weather Channel API could be used to build compelling hardware hacks. The results were fantastic with 6 different teams (out of 25 total) presenting hacks built using weather data.
After an opening workshop and presentation by evangelists Daniel Holmlund and Stewart Christie, the hacking kicked off with team formation.
Once teams were formed, the hacking and unboxing could start.
As developers got up and running with their Edison devices and Intel Mashery APIs, I spent a bit of time with some familiar faces including Parminder Devsi from a local robotics startup, RoboDub.
Daniel Holmlund showed off his "Smart Skateboard" built with Intel Edison and blocks produced by SparkFun.
On the second day, after much hacking, teams finalized their projects and congregated to learn about the winning hacks.
Team Ensemble built a "Smart Dress" wired with Intel Edison and sensors, useful for recording dance performances and translating them to music.
Team Ensemble wound up winning the entire event and included members Martin Smith, Dian Keratin, Josh Buchacher, Fen Xie, Junying Chang, Rene Alfredo Garcia Hernandez, Andrew Ernst, Kai Curtis, Jon Madison, Robert Snell and Liz Rush.
Other projects using Mashery APIs included:
Yournament: Smart LCD-based ornament for showing outside weather built by Seth May, Ben Foster, Chris Barret, Thinh Le, Eric Yee, Kyle Sessions and Keenan Fejeran.
Epicenter: A community board for the homeless capable of messaging users about weather forecast data. Built by Mohammad Juma, Keith Lueneburg, Reid Thompson, Samir Sbai, Zackory Parker, Antonio Orozco and Brandon Thomas. HTTPole Display: A smart “Pole Display” to show weather data inside retail shops, adding a REST API to the display screen. Built by Troy and Desiree Anderson.
Cabin Weather: A weather tracking station hack using Intel Edison and temperature, light, sound sensors to relay weather data to park rangers by Christopher Richins, Josh Holmes and Jacob Riggs.
Smart Bike: An IoT device which attaches to your bike and can warn family members of a crash or warn the rider of adverse weather conditions by Allen Yeung, Gene Catham and Yashar Fakhari.
Overall it was a very successful event and I am looking forward to many more like it!