While browsing Hacker News, we came opposite this engaging account of Andrei Pop [ blog , chatter ] that tells about how he won a new Facebook hackathon using an arduino hack.
It is a new direction that hardware as well has entered the hackathon scenario. Here are engaging excerpts from his honest account!
A couple of months ago 3 friends and we participated in the facebook hackathon at UBC. It was a 36 hour, redbull-fueled intrigue in that really a couple of teams participated. We won. I'm not revelation you this story to brag, we wish to share with you what we learned. In all honesty, we was repelled we won, but we regard that adhering to a couple of beliefs helped:
1. Don't vie with your second most appropriate arsenal
2. Solve a actual problem
3. Breadth instead of height can pay off
Yes, you've listened this recommendation before and there are exceptions to every rule... I'm only pity my personal experience.
Our group consisted of a designer, a biomedical operative (who didn't write a singular line of code), a CS tyro (without a skepticism the most "qualified" of all of us), and myself (a Political Science grad). we was the only non-engineering-educated person in the room. One necessary doctrine we have schooled over and over in life is that it is fatuous to vie on a metric that you cannot presumably be the most appropriate at. Don't vie with your second most appropriate arsenal. You must be find the corner that nobody else will regard of, or where nobody else can be. If the contest can outspend you, outmanouever them. If the man at the club is improved looking, be funnier. And if most of the guys in the room have PhDs in CS, go for hardware?
The night before the hackathon we picked up an arduino microcontroller, a couple of LEDs, a few alligator clips, and a breadboard. we didn't really know how things would advance together, but we had outlayed a few time hardware hacking and we was really meddlesome in earthy computing. we moreover figured that most of the guys in the room wouldn't be considering about hardware (this was a facebook hackathon, most people were seeking up the Open Graph API). we hoped hardware would be the edge, and as it turns out, it was.
After a bit of brainstorming and chinese food we concluded to erect Locksmasher " an arduino powered unlocking resource that would hoop authentication by the Open Graph API. We longed for to emanate a way to give one-time access to facebook friends that must be obtain in to your house.
Half an hour in to the brainstorming, one of my group members had to leave the hackathon to let a buddy in to his house. This eventuality sparked the thought of locksmasher and outlines my second indicate " compromise a actual problem. A qualification for a craft's consequence can frequently be futile. There are unquestionably exceptions to this, but most of the time, beginning with a tangible complaint and request your craft, instead of the other way around. The judges desired that they could privately describe to the complaint of wanting to let someone in to their residence when they weren't home.
Our penetrate was very elementary " it was nothing more than a saved switch that talked to facebook. Graeham (our biomedical engineer) bending up an aged doorway close to the arduino for the demo. Yazad (the CS student) and we wrote a NodeJS server to speak to facebook. We outlayed most of the time traffic with authentication, a complaint that could have been solved in a couple of hours by a improved hacker who knows the facebook API well. In the meantime Vince (our designer) done all look very beautiful. This brings me to my final indicate point, infrequently extent is improved than depth. we wish to credit a extensive amount of the success to Vince's pattern work and Graeham's hardware. By the finish of the 36 hours, we had addressed a small bit of everything.
Most of the hackers in the room built a few very cultured projects; appurtenance learning algorithms, recommendation algorithms formed on your friends likes, information parsing applications. However many of the projects were cultured for magnificence consequence and didn't compromise a suffering indicate that the judges could describe to. Furthermore, they didn't look at the entire package (arguably not necessary for a hackathon but we of course regard the smooth UI helped win over the crowd).
It simply highlights arduino's affability to hooking with assorted technologies. It indeed comes out as the overpass between hardware and software.
The plan demo lies here .
Any hackathons worldwide in that the readers have used their Arduino? Please do link the demo or your blog We would admire to read!
Via:[ designcodelearn , HackerNews ]
This access was postedby Priya Kuber on Sunday, June 3rd, 2012 and is filed beneath Facebook , Hackathon , Hacks , Hardware , arduino .You can follow any responses to this access by the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a reply , or trackback from your own site.
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