#hackprinceton

My latest project, created at Hack Princeton 2014. http://challengepost.com/software/dash-lqumf

Tweet turn-by-turn directions, right from ur ride /cc @boostedboards @GarryTan @HackPrinceton @ohhaiwalid pic.twitter.com/WyFLdIMgam

— TwitterDev (@TwitterDev)

November 16, 2014

So, apparently I only write blog posts when I have a hackathon thing to show off. Meh.

For this hackathon, we did...drumroll please... Piano Stairs! We installed these (very sneakily) on a staircase in the Friend Engineering Center.

How did we do this? Along one side of the stairs are photoresistors (aka light sensors). On the other are flashlights. An Arduino Uno reads in values from the photoresistors, and calibrates itself appropriately when started. Then, it determines when a footstep occurs based on those light values. It sends that info to a Raspberry Pi, which handles producing the actual sounds. 

People really enjoyed the piano stairs, so, I think it was a success.

Most terrifying was when they asked us to move the stairs into the final demo room (there were two rounds of demos). We had ~10 minutes to move everything. Shockingly, it worked, and we won 2nd place for hardware!

Moar videos:

http://instagram.com/p/gjBPXsukvb/?autoplay=true (the end of our final demo)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou2-dDfrOmU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgZZ90E_d9I

HackPrinceton was awesome! It was 24 hours of goodness, ice cream, failures and triumphs, etc, etc...

And I came out of it with:

A brand-new, free Arduino + some electronics parts (thanks, hardware reimbursements!)

The Biggest Fail prize! (Cash, mind you.)

Newly re-forged connections with the awesome people I ended up working with (names: Kanika and Vincent).

I knew Kanika, a senior in the ELE department, vaguely through PWiCS; we agreed via Facebook to try working together for the hackathon. Vincent I ran into at registration -- we'd been in Japanese together! Together we formed Team Tape, so named because our projects were kinda dependent on way too much masking tape.

We ended up sequestering ourselves in the basement of Sherrerd, where the hackathon was held. I really need to get better at seizing good spots quickly at hackathons. It matters a lot! But the basement was fine.

I initially wanted to build mat-less DDR using a Wiimote and IR LEDs. Unfortunately, that kind of fell through because we wasted hours searching for a library that would let us read off IR data. (We found stuff for accelerometer data, for example, but never IR data...) Of course after the hackathon ended someone showed me motej. Oh well.

Instead, we ended up building:

DDR Gloves (aka, Pattycake, Pattycake, D!D!R!)

The Mario Box

Follow up posts for each of those coming soon.

The idea for DDR gloves struck around 12 midnight. What if we attached touch sensors to the fronts and backs of our hands, and played pattycake?? A-ha! A genius idea.

The Mario Box was honestly a silly idea meant to get me a hardware reimbursement for an Arduino. ;) But it was fun! The idea: a box that only opens if you knock on it in the secret pattern....