ATT Hackathon 2019
Introduction
From Friday, November 22nd to Saturday, I competed at AT&T Hackathon 2019. My team and I opposed 14 teams from all over the Czech Republic from high schools and universities. Expectations were high, but our central heating team won the 3rd prize, which contained 1,000 USD. This article contains brief information about our story at Hackathon.
Our idea
The biggest problem for our team was to find a good idea. We had many ideas, but the final one came after 6 hours of thinking. We had many ideas like smart henhouse or system for managing Co-working spaces that already exist. We chose to work on smart sensors that would measure CO2, temperature, average humidity and amount of light. Because systems like this already existed, we had to add special value.
Our product
Our solution was to come into the company and deploy our sensors. Leave our sensors in the company for 48 hours and then collect them. The sensors would work locally and raspberry pi would be collecting data from sensors. Then we would analyze collected data from raspberry pi and create a report of the situation in the company. The report would be created by a desktop application written in python that would compare hygienic standards with collected data. If you want to know more you can check out our project on hackster.io.
What we missed
If we would have more time we would created a wooden box for our sensors in FabVan(Fablab van).
Problems that we faced
We chose to use Big Clown sensors, but we hadn’t any previous experience with them. So for the first few hours, we were struggling with them. Our Java backend programmers were waiting a long time before we had data from sensors and they could only guess how will sensors data look like. We also didn’t know how to create a PDF in python, so we had to learn it. And finally, there was a presentation. We had only 3 minutes to present our product and convince the jury.
Our team
Our team was created by students from the “Střední průmyslová škola Brno, Purkyňova, příspěvková organizace”. It wasn’t the first Hackathon where we competed. Last year we were at Junior Hackathon 2018, where we did not win a regular prize, but thanks to our traffic AI we received a special prize for the best technological solution. Cooperation was the only way.
Conclusion
We enjoyed this event and we are looking for another challenge. Although we were very tired (after 16 hours), we continued programming. Thanks to refreshments in the form of free food and drinks we managed to last until the end. I would like to thank companies AT&T, JA Czech and all the organizers and mentors for this opportunity.