#@amit

After the great experience we had at Hackster.io Phoenix last month, I had the opportunity to help developers build hardware hacks at Hackster.io's hardware weekend in Boston, earlier this week.

Some very good quality hacks were produced in less than 30 hours. What was really impressive was the energy and the enthusiasm of the developers. Lots of new faces as well, which is always a great sign. You get to help developers who have never been to a hackathon. Always exciting.

Also, kudos to the Hackster.io team for securing an amazing space - MassChallenge, a Startup accelerator based out of Boston. MassChallenge opened up their Hardware labs for the developers, which allowed hackers to do what they do best - write incredibe code, to power the hardware.

Quick Look

On 9-10 May 2015, Hackster.io hosted the Hardware weekend in Boston.

About 40 developers attended.

Hosted at MassChallenge , a Startup accelerator based out of London.

12 hacks were built in less than 30 hours.

6 hacks were built using Intel Edison development boards.

Intel Edison Hacks built

Swear Jar - listens in for blacklisted words through an Android app, and opens up to charge you money when it hears one. It uses shields from the Grove Seeed Starter kit and the Arduino Edison IDE to run a web server that listens for a command to open the jar via the servo, waits 15 seconds for $ to be deposited, and then closes.

Coffee Control - Using the Intel Edison and Ubidots cloud service, this hack allows you to trigger an action (like serving coffee) once a WiFi client is detected in a WiFi network.

Car seat confidence - Detects child and sends an alarm to your phone alerting you that the child is still in your vehicle. Also, streams video to your device.

Robots over Internet - A robotic arm that can be controlled over the Internet. Not sure why that would be useful, but it should be fun

Drone Swap - Allows you to increase Drone uptime by swapping batteries.

Remote FPGA.io - A proof of concept built to demonstrate the flexibility of Nysa, an FPGA development platform.

Complete list of Hacks built on Hackster.io

After the wonderful experience we had being part of TNW Hackathon in Amsterdam earlier this year, last week, I had the opportunity to help developers battle it out at the Kings of code Hack Battle in New York.

Organized by the folks at The Next Web in conjunction with the TNW Conference, the Hack Battle was a lot of fun. Some good quality hacks were produced in less than 36 hours. What was really impressive was the energy and the enthusiasm of the developers. One example in lieu of that is that bulk of the developers ended up hacking all night. Lots of new faces as well, which is always a great sign. You get to help developers who have never been to a hackathon. Always exciting.

Also, kudos to the TNW team for securing an amazing venue space which allowed hackers to stay overnight and do what the do best - write incredibe code!

Quick Look

On 6-7 December 2014, TNW hosted the Kings of Code Hack Battle at The Alley in NYC as part of the TNW Conference.

Over 80 developers attended.

Hosted at The Alley NYC, a popular co-working space in midtown New York.

Over 15 hacks were built in less than 36 hours.

3 Apps were built using APIs from the Mashery network

2 hardware hacks were built using the Intel Edison development boards.

Mashery/Intel Edison Hacks built

FollowPlants - A hardware hack built using the Intel Edison development board that lets you track water/nutrients, temp control for your plants.

TindHouse - A mobile app that allows users to search for housing, using the HomeFinder API then quickly judge interest based on user criteria.

FoodLoop web app A mobile app that lets you order food based on your dietary and nutrition preferences, using the Food Essentials API.

Complete list of Hacks built on Hacker League

“Say no to everything, so you can say yes to the one thing.” ~ Richie Norton

With a product like Hacker League that’s loved and used everyday by developers, to hackathon organizers, to just plain hackathon enthusiasts, we’ve been taking a closer look at exactly what would really make the experience better for our Hacker League community.

With Swift’s help, we dug into the Hacker League infrastructure, explored its nooks and crannies, and mapped out what we need to do in the next few months to improve the performance and user experience.

But what’s really cool is that we’ve pulled together some amazing talent to get to work on Hacker League. Today, I would like to share some of the things that we’ve been working on.

Here’s what we’ve been up to

The message we heard loud and clear from the community back when we took over Hacker League was - “Hacker League is awesome; don’t screw it up with a million unnecessary features.” So instead of adding unnecessary features, we’ve spent most of our time simplifying the existing features and improving the usability.

Make the Hackathons page load faster: We’ve rolled out a faster & improved performance of the Hackathons list page, making it easier to quickly find the hackathon you’re looking for.

Make it easier to add a Location to my hackathon: A new redesigned Address/Locaton selector for the “Create new Hackathon" page. It uses the Google Maps API to provide suggested Address, City, State, and Country Suggestions as you type, making it faster for you to create your hackathon and ensuring that the location is in a standard format, making it easier to search and discover.

Give me a Visual Map to help interested developers locate my hackathon: A Map with the chosen address plotted on it is then displayed, assuring organizers that users will be able to find directions using Google Maps.

Make it easier for me to sort/arrange the wiki pages for my hackathon: Ability to reorder/arrange the wiki links on the left side bar. The wiki links on the hackathon details page are now sorted alphabetically, instead of creation date. You can now control the order of the wiki pages simply by adding a page order number in front of the wiki name. This will ensure that they are arranged in the order you want, not the order you may have created them in.

Video embeds - The Hacker League wiki pages now support video embeds, so you can now include YouTube/Vimeo videos right into the wiki itself.

Help me make my hackathon pages look pretty: Introducing Hacker League Markdown Templates. Ready to be used Markdown templates for Overview, Schedule, Location & other popular pages you as an organizer might need to create for your hackathon. All available here on GitHub.

Add Support for BitBucket: You now have a choice to include a link to your GitHub or BitBucket repos on your user profile page.

I want to throw a private, internal hackathon: Hacker League Enterprise is now being used by Intel customers. General Electric used Hacker League Enterprise to run their recent in May at their GE Software headquarters in Northern California.

Plenty of bugs, annoyances, and enhancements (thanks to those of you who posted them on UserVoice)

What’s next

Among many requests we received from you, these two stood out pretty distinctly, and will be rolling out shortly -

Refresh the website design for Hacker League. Make it beautiful and more functional, without losing the simplicity.

Easily search for hackathons by name and location.

This is just a start. We plan to do a ton of work on Hacker League over the next few months. We’re also tapping the expertise of people across Mashery with skills in design, user experience, and front-end web interfaces. With their help, we’re going to build a better Hacker League.

We’re listening

We want to know what new features you’d like, what current features need tweaking, or whatever you’d like to share. If you have ideas, thoughts, suggestions, and requests, we’d be grateful if you’d put them into writing and drop us a note at feedback [at] hackerleague [dot] org, or tweet us at @hackerleague.

We will do our best to keep you well-informed, seek your feedback, and make Hacker League better than it was before. Stay tuned for what’s next, and please keep the feedback coming.

Amit Jotwani (@amit)

I wrote a recap post “Princeton’s got talent" back in November 2011, when I represented Mashery at Startup Weekend Princeton. I ended that post with -

Really awesome hacks got built out over the weekend. The quality of the hacks was simply mind blowing. Here’s a shout out to all teams that participated. Great stuff!

This year was no different, except that Princeton’s got a lot of hardware talent as well now, plus their love for APIs is ever growing.

Having missed out on the fall edition of HackPrinceton last year, I was pretty excited about attending the spring version this past weekend.

Quick Look

On 28 March 2014, Princeton University hosted HackPrinceton at their campus.

The hackathon, including the science fair style demos were held at the University’s beautiful Jadwin Gym, which was an excellent venue choice because it made sure that everyone was in one building, except the people building hardware hacks, who were at Princeton University’s hardware labs.

About 250 developers attended from various universities

Intel’s J.D Patel and Bryan Mackenzie gave a talk explaining the benefits of Intel XDK and developing with Galileo boards respectively.

Stephen Wolfram of WolframAlpha fame gave a talk on Wolfram Alpha’s new cloud technologies.

Some really cool hardware hacks were built including AirBike and Twitchy.

5 Mashery hacks built using - TomTom, USAToday, Bookshare APIs.

Over 90 hacks were built in less than 36 hours.

Science fair style demos for 91 hacks built. Top 20 got to demo.

5 Apps were built using APIs from the Mashery network.

3 Apps were built using Intel XDK.

Best hacks built using Mashery API Network

SmartCar Assistant: An iPad app that allows the cars to be “smarter”, by providing turn-by-turn navigation, real-time navigation and traffic information powered by TomTom API, Lane departure warning, Collision avoidance and blind spot detection using OpenCV line detection algorithms. Four ultrasonic range sensors wirelessly update the soundings of the vehicle for Collision avoidance and blind spot detection.

**Guru Genie* An email based service that provides answers via trigger based emails. It allows you to get the latest news (via USAToday API), books info (via Bookshare API) and also answers to mathematical equations by simply sending an email to [email protected] along with a keyword that acts as a trigger for the query. For example, put “integrate sqrt(x)*cos(x) dx from 0 to 10” in the body of your email. Ask for “give me some current news”, query for “books harry potter” to search for books with harry potter in title.

Other notable hacks

AirBike (1st place) A fantastic bike sharing system which uses a wireless electronic lock and an iPhone app to enable hubless, decentralized bike sharing. Deservedly won the first prize under the hardware category.

Echocast An application that lets you send information wirelessly over high frequency sound. Data is encoded in a sound file which can be played by any common speaker and then decoded by any common microphone. Echocast uses frequencies above the human hearing range, so the transfer is silent. The application does not need any additional hardware - it works with the speakers and microphone that come with any laptop or smartphone.

Twitchy An acrylic laser-cut hexapod that has twelve degrees of freedom. It is powered by an Arduino that takes input from an Electric Imp, which is in turn connected to a Twitch server, so you can control him over the internet — it’s Twitch Plays Twitchy, where you can make it walk forward and backward, turn left and right, and wave.

In 1927, a scientist named Philo Taylor Farnsworth invented and patented the first operational all-electronic television system. His lab was located on the second floor of an existing building at 202 Green Street in the Northeast Waterfront District of San Francisco.

It was only fitting that the TV of Tomorrow (TVOT) hackathon in San Francisco was held at the very same building couple weeks ago.

The Mashery table all set for developers on day-1 at TVOT Hackathon

What is TVOT Hackathon?

TVOT Hackathon brought together developers and creatives to envision and build the TV of Tomorrow.

Held at the offices of Ignite Video, the very building where Philo Farnsworth invented electronic television more than 85 years ago, TVOT got about 40 developers to re-imagine the TV industry and build innovative apps around the Television.

The hackathon was kicked off on morning of Day-1 with demos from the participating API providers, including Tribune Media Services, Gracenote, Direct TV and Mashery of course.

Amy Crowley from Tribune Media Services talks to developers about the entertainment data available through TMS' Data Delivery APIs.

The Workshops

Developers who wanted to learn more about an API or trouble using an API could walk into respective API workshops that were held throughout Day-1 and get their questions answered.

The TMS API Team hosted a workshop to show developers the entertainment data available via their API using I/O Docs - an interactive way to explore and learn new APIs.

The Hacks

As many as 13 hacks were built in less than 30 hours, including 5 apps that were built using the Mashery API Network. Complete list of hacks here

Best Mashery Hack

Hubble - An iOS app built by Amazon interns Tanvir Ahmed and Gaurav Soni, that allows you to control your Direct TV Set Top Box, view TV listings for your area using the Tribune Media Services API.

Hubble also pulls up score of games currently live using SportsDataLLC's API. By far one of the most polished apps I've seen at a hackathon. Read up more on what Hubble can do here

More Mashery Hacks

HiveMind - An app that scans tweets from your neighborhood, finds the program that is trending and then tunes your television to that program by matching it to the entertainment guide using Tribune Media Services API.

Project: Iron Man Built by Ethan Fan and Mark Xie, Iron Man uses voice recognition + hand gestures via Leap Motion to control TV with entertainment data provided by Tribune Media ServicesAPI. Very cool app indeed.

Time Pressure: Race against the clock to decide what to watch. A web app that uses "pressure mechanism" to help friends decide what movie to watch using Rotten Tomatoes API. You only have a minute to decide what movie you'd like to watch.

TV2Phone An app that sends a notification on the TV screen when interactive content is available on the second screen. If the user interacts with the notification, the system sends a link connecting the users device to the extra interactive content. Pulls up the entertainment data using the Tribune Media Services API.

MixTape - An app that uses Tribune Media Services API data to act as a channel creation tool for aggregating LIVE broadcast, Video-on-Demand and YouTube supplemented with web based info into one personally flavored channel that runs on a scheduled broadcast allowing a shared experience.

We partnered with AT&T last week for the AT&T Aspire Mobile App Hackathon held at the Applico offices in New York. Aspire Mobile hackathon is is an event produced by the AT&T Developer Program that brings developers & designers together to help them build web/mobile apps.

Accompanying Mashery was OpenClove - a cloud based video platform that allows live video sharing, chat, social interaction and collaboration across a plethora of devices and applications.

Shubh from OpenClove talks about the OpenClove API

One thing I really liked about this event was the new breed of developers that it attracted. Given the rate of hackathons in NYC, you tend to see several repeat developers at each event. But not this time. This hackathon proved to be a great opportunity to reach out to new developers and help them build something awesome in just over 24 hours.

Some really good quality hacks were produced, many of which used Mashery APIs.

Some really cool apps built

Kazoku - a mobile app that allows parents to assign tasks to their kids, such as homework, and then helps track progress. It then gamifies the experience by allowing kids to earn points for the tasks completed. The parents also have an option to have video conversations with their children, should they need any assistance, using OpenClove's Video SDK.

It touched the judges as well and they walked away with being adjudged Second Prize winners along with Best app built using OpenClove API Prize.

Congratulations Team Kazoku - Winners of best app built using @OpenClove and Runners up at #atthack

Oh my math - a clever web based game that teaches children math concepts such as ranges and averages in a unique fun way -- by letting them answer sports data related questions. The sports data was provided using ESPN's Stats API.

I really loved this app for it's simplicity and the age old problem it attempts to solve - how to make learning fun. Beautifully done. It ended up winning the "Best App Built using Mashery API Network" prize - a subscription to lynda.com for each of it's members. Pretty educational eh!

Team Oh, my math

Congratulations Team Oh, my Math on winning the "Best App built using Mashery API Network" Prize #atthack

GuruKool - an Android app that allows students and teachers to collaborate via multi-party video using OpenClove's Android Video SDK. They were the Grand Prize winners for the entire event, and also the runners-up for the OpenClove prize.

Team GuruKool

Congratulations Team GuruKool: Grand prize winners and @OpenClove runners up at #atthack