Fantastic Hackathon! Amazing #HackPHX!
The #hackPHX Arduino hackathon was held at HeatSync Labs, the Phoenix area hackerspace in March 2nd. Ten teams of hackers gathered together to compete, some are veteran while some are newbie, of course they respectively have special skills in 3D printing, laser welding, sewing, to just name a few. They can make full use of all the hackerspace as they want, and bring whatever hardwear to the Lab. As is a hackathon, we definitely want to see something out of box, so let’s run to see this inspiration feat!!
The winners
Team 1 Clock
Prescott, Bruce, and Jon
CLOCK
Team 1 has brought us a really amazing working clock! The wheels turn one forward and one reverse, spinning the reflectance sensors around the wheel indicating the minutes. Upon the hour mark the bot drives forward and advances the linear slide to indicate hours. Extra credit for the free linear rails made out of laser cut scrap and cellophane tape!
Team 6 Simon
SIMON
George, Kevin, and Rob created a wonderful designed bot. Maybe they have created a new game: Simon! When the bot plays out a tune with lights, you can use the laser cut puck to mark the tones on the whiteboard. The shield bot then drives forward and uses the sensors to see if you’ve marked correctly. You want to get more right answers than your opponent so the bot drives towards their goal! What is really amazing? The cost is free, for all the materials they prepared are waste in labs, so really environment friendly! And it completes with Braille so even the sight impaired could play it as well! 🙂
Runners up:
Team 2 RichBot/ ShitBot
Luis, James and Chad
The Rich bot / Shit bot would sense your hand and completely randomly choose to deposit an amount of chicken poop or money. They hope to implement a risk dial, which when advanced would deposit more money per play, but also more poop per loss.
Team 3 Pew Pew
PEW PEW
Aly, Aaron, and Jose built Pew Pew, a modern music box. During the Friday night break they devised a 31 bit language of music. You draw out your tune on paper and insert into the machine. The wheels of the shield bot draw the paper in past the reflectance sensors and the music plays! Really cool!
Team 4 K-4
Jac, Stewart and Max
K-4
Team four came very close to a desktop x,y plotter system. 8 lights would align the bot which would drive to whichever location required pen output and a servo would drop the pen. Sadly they found incompatibilities with the Arduino servo library and the Shieldbot and were unable to overcome these. Credit given for the Dr. Who theme including the awesome papercraft K-9 done in lasercut plastic! So come on guys, you can make it!
Team 5 BARMAN
BARMAN
Hey! When you text a message to this bar bot, it will deliver a delicious beverage to Jerry, Jake, and Bowtie went for a bar bot that could deliver a delicious beverage via a text message using the Seeed GSM shield. In the end their Sim card crapped out and they had to switch to a simpler line follower implementation to make the deadline.
Team 7 Shot.Bot
SHOT.BOT
Moheeb, Ben and Rob also went for a beverage deliver system! Our hackers do love create in life and are enjoying life in their own way 🙂 Though more ambitious than Team 5, they didn’t finish full functionality in time. What they did create was a really gorgeous device that you can see the line following robot would take orders then drive the track to the dispenser where it would use a servo to actuate an amount of either of 3 beverages, before driving back to the patron. Amazing! Don’t you think so? Once put into market, many retailers will be keen on this automatic beverage remixed machine!
Team 8 HACKPHX-PLOTTER
HACKPHX-PLOTTER
Brian, Matt, and Justin got very close to knocking off the Der Kritzler 2d drawing machine. In only 12 hours they created a vertical x,y table with makerslide and had the ingenious idea of bolting the tires of the shield bot down such that when it was put in reverse, it lifted the pen off the drawing surface! They even worked with the designer to come up with a PC side user interface!
Team 9 EYE
EYE
Tim, Karl, and Steven Came very close to winning the Jury prize for their very functional robot eye. The eye utilizes an ultrasonic sensor to trigger the wheels in a forward/reverse configuration turning the eye to follow those who wander by. Creepy.
Team 10 MUSICBOX O’ DEATH
MUSICBOX’O DEATH
Adam, Sheldon, Mike also had musical ambitions with their bot. Paper was to be driven across the reflectance sensors just like the other music box team. In the end they had to fall back on “Z-Plane Ghettoblaster” technology and the ghost of Jonathan Taylor Thomas to get something working by judging time.
Ahha! Everybody, it’s high time that we should recover our secret ingredient in Hackathon! It’s SHIELD BOT from our Seeed Studio! This adorable shield has five reflectance sensors, two DC motors and a 3.7V lion battery. As you can see, bot enjoys diverse powerful role in hacker’s creation of hackathon! 🙂
Shield Bot
Above all are precise descriptions for our ten teams’ splendid fruits. They make us believe it is not impossible to conduct DIY time machine, a new style of beverage dispenser, immediate 2D drawing machine, however, we probably never thought of before. Not only you can see even scraps are well gathered together then amazingly transformed into a fantastic functional product but they really make it! We have witness a creative feat, thanks to hackathon and ingenious hackers from ten teams! Congratulations!
For more information about #hackathon, please click link here:
http://hackphx.com/arduino_winter2012/
And we have the video report for this hackathon, you can’t miss it!
Actually all their ideas reward more talking, so if you have any idea of their innovation or your own idea, your comments are more than welcome :)!!
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