11–20 of 89 posts
On that note, I would say that using Gimbal beacons to power a walking tour app was something that people responded really well to. From a tech side, I had to write some adapters for ionic that I had never done before. It worked surprisingly well
I wrote up how I built the React Native app part in under 24 hours: https://nanohop.com/2017/04/25/how-we-built-a-react-native-a...
It was really neat seeing the hardware and software come together in only a day!
I normally consider hackathons a questionable way to engage the tech community. In my opinion they seldom lead to anything sustainable and set the wrong expectations. [3]
Disclosure: I helped finance the continued product development through our organisational work.
[1] http://www.techsangam.com/2011/11/08/my-thoughts-on-bangalor...
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969716...
[3] https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/07/are-hackathons-stupid/6...
A real-time voice-based lyrics suggester, in a web browser. Similar to a karaoke machine, but the rhyming words are generated based on your most recent word. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3aOPo5ofPU&t=47m
Can you elaborate on some of the tech you used to make this? Pretty cool to be able to hear a word and provide another word which rhymes.
We generated the rhyming words using the CMU Pronunciation Dictionary [1]. These were saved in a map, which mapped a word to its list of rhyming words. Initially, the rhyming words produced were short and uninteresting. So we repeated this process, but this time sorted the rhyming words by "coolness", which at its simplest, was a measure of the word's length and the number of phonemes. To save time, the map contained only 20k of the most popular English words. The map was encoded as JSON and served to the browser.
In the browser, the Web Speech API performed speech recognition. Each time we detected the end of a sentence, we used the last word to look up a list of rhyming words from the map. The rhyming words were then displayed in a randomized order. This continued in a loop.
There's also a tiny Q&A section in the video [2].
In general hackathons are based on the idea of programming as producing objects/products/services (which all decay over time), rather than seeing programming as the act of codifying understanding of a formal (or informal) system into an executable representation (which its users continue updating to match their mental model for as long as they find it useful). The purpose of many hackathons being "build apps/widgets…
Beyond this, hackathons are also great at surrounding yourself by a ton of knowledge and talent to learn something very very quickly that you might struggle to learn on your own as quickly.
And finally -- a lot of devs work remotely or alone, and hackathons are excellent at developing skills of working in a team. And also just getting the in-person enjoyment of interacting with others who are interested in the same thing.
A single hackathon is only a day or two. What you get out of it compared to the time you spent is huge.
In general hackathons are based on the idea of programming as producing objects/products/services (which all decay over time), rather than seeing programming as the act of codifying understanding of a formal (or informal) system into an executable representation (which its users continue updating to match their mental model for as long as they find it useful). The purpose of many hackathons being "build apps/widgets…
As my classmate and I were talking through Skype the night before the competition started, I looked through my window and could see the stars. However, I could also see my face dimly lit from my laptop screen overlapping. So it came to me that it was a great way of making a HUD for a prototype.
We got to it and built the prototype from scratch. It took a lot of work and resourcefulness, rushing to get a webcam from friends that would work a Sunday morning (in Spain that year shops were closed on Sundays). Then we used several languages I already knew, if I remember correctly: HTML, CSS, PHP as the HUD display was actually a webpage, Processing for hand tracking and C++ for Arduino. I made the whole software part and my classmate the hardware+electronics. There were some more things like sensors and stuff that we made.
For the local phase we made it theatrical starting with the moon landing audio and the lights off, with me entering wearing the helmet and barely able to breathe and my classmate with the laptop and cables. Connect the projector and a screen appears. I'm sweating, but I point with my finger at a part of the screen and it correctly reads where and displays the info real-time. The same for the other 4 points and I can feel truly happy inside that it is working.
After winning the local one we rushed to get votes since we got into the People's Choice category and we had a strong battle against Macedonia's team. They were Trending Topic for most of the week the contest was happening in their whole country while in Spain it was all about football and celebs and we just made it into regional newspapers at that point. Another team also used bots but of course NASA people detected it. We won in the end, visited Cape Canaveral and saw a rocket launch.
One of the best moments (of my life) was when I came to class after winning the whole thing and everyone stood up and started clapping.
Here is the project, https://2014.spaceappschallenge.org/project/space-helmet/ (yes, for the video we used a fishtank and printed GoPros as props)
Many edits: added extra info and details, sorry for the long post.
A Harry Potter style "Maruauder's Map" which tracks people in a business/location in real-time. [1] [1] https://github.com/schollz/find-maraudersmap