On the same day that we announced the launch of our new IoT developer program at Mobile World Congress, we kicked off two sets of hackathons in Barcelona. With fifty developers each day,each with an Intel(r) Galileo board, a live USB, a wifi adapter, a set of cables and some sensors this was a pilot for the series of twenty IoT hackathons being planned for later in the year.
The before and after image below shows the large pile of boxes that arrived from various vendors and destinations. These were assembled on site to create the Development Kits, and distributed to the attendees each day. Individual developers and teams from local universities worked their way from the blinking led example to actually sending sensor data to the cloud, also known as the IoT Analytics Platform as a Service. The after image shows what one team built using two Galileo boards: a servo controlled car with direction tracking camera.
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On Wednesday,after a day or two of hacking the developers were invited back to give the Intel Team some feedback on their experience. More than 65% of the developers came back to help us improve the Developer Kit, with "constructive feedback". Luckily most of the cursing was in Spanish, as befits an event in Barcelona, and following our social media policy of "good, or bad, but not ugly" all of the participants input was gathered. Despite the anticipated teething problems, and even some devkit components not clearing customs until late on day one afternoon, everyone seemed to have a good time.
Hacking the hackathon.
Our null modem cables were delayed by airport customs, and did not arrive until 16:30 on our first day, but in true hackathon fashion the developers used the kit of small jumper cables we supplied to construct a pin-swapper to get the serial port data from the Galileo board. One by one this solution rippled from team to team, like a real world viral video, and soon every team had a "community developed" fix to the problem. It wasn't very robust but it was functional and epitomized the lessons I've learned from participating in several local maker hackathons. Step one:- get something working that you can demonstrate. Step two:- there is no step two.
If you are a maker, and can build something using hot glue and duct tape, I hope to meet you at our upcoming series of hackathons.
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