#hardwareweekend

Hackster’s “Hack to the Future” Hardware Weekend took place in Phoenix, Arizona last weekend at Local Motors. Participants gathered at this car factory for a two-day hardware hackathon.  Intel’s Steven Xing and I attended as Intel mentors and provided Edison support to participating developers. 

Hackster’s Adam Benzion kicked off opening ceremonies Saturday morning to a crowd comprised of local Phoenix residents and Arizona State University students.  The Intel prize for the Best Use of Intel Edison: up to three Jumping Sumo Parrot Drones.

A series of hardware workshops were presented to help participants better understand the available technologies.  Steven and I presented the Intel Edison, described it’s features and introduced Edison building tools and additional Intel technologies including XDK IoT Edition and the Intel Mashery API Network.

Participants joined us on stage and shared their experience with and showed their support for Edison.

Teams formed, collaborated, and worked on their projects through Sunday.  They used available hardware and sought help from participating mentors and sponsors to help strengthen their applications.

In between project building, participants explored Local Motors’ facilities and vehicles, and were invited to develop applications for Hackster’s DeLorean DMC-12 which was featured in past “Hack to the Future” events including Seattle and Portland.

On Sunday afternoon, teams presented their projects to judges and spectators.

The “Best Use of Intel Edison” prize was awarded to the three member team that created “Party Bot.”  This party enhancer project incorporated the Edison into a four legged robot designed to seek out quiet areas of a party, and then activates flashing lights, music, and bursts of confetti.  “Party Bot” also won the “Best Party Robot” prize.

Four additional Edison projects won prizes: “Smart Guidance for the Visually Impaired” won the “Humanities” prize, “MonYcar” won the “All the Sensors All the Time” prize with their car monitoring system, “3D Controller Bot” won the “Microchip” prize with their 3D printer application enhancer, and “RunDMC” won the “Most Likely Award”...to succeed as a product, with their DeLorean driver detector and touch sensor car starter.

Special thanks goes to Intel’s Jim St. Leger and Suresh Golwalkar for attending this event and showing their “Hack to the Future” support.

Thanks goes to Hackster’s Adam Benzion and his team for organizing this great event.   And lastly, thanks “Hack to the Future” Phoenix participants for demonstrating your development skills and challenging yourselves to build awesome apps.