HACK CAMP 2020🎉 - a 36 Hrs Hackathon Summary

hackathon Feb 28, 2020

Hackcamp,it was conducted by a non-profittable organization called Hack Club.

SCHEDULE:8th&9th February 2020 .

VENUE:Integrated Startup Complex, Kalamassery.

The coolest part of this hackathon was its sponsors-MLH (Major League Hacking), Github, Sticker Mule etc.Those 36 hours were very interesting;met new people,learned from them ,brain stormed new ideas and to be noticed this was my first hackathon so that I was't having any previous idea of what a hackathon comprises of,but now I suggest every hackers/ coders /developers to attend these hackathons happening nearby.Because these hackathons provide several base for us to grow and main example of that is networking.

Now before continuing it is essential to make you aware of what a hackathon is.

What is a Hackathon?
Hackathons are events where makers/coders get-together to brainstorm ideas and collaborate on them to build awesome projects.
They are the best shot for anyone interested in learning new things to come up with innovative ideas or solutions and work on it to bring them to life. Hackathons also help you to make new connections with amazing people and of course you get to win cool prizes and swags!

Major League Hacks (MLH) and MakerGram provided hardware and was a great support throughout the journey, which was an interesting segment of the same..

Actually there were no special participation criteria but some common criteria were there like resume clearing .And a day before hackathon we have got an email regarding our entry to HackCamp 2020.

For this hackathon me and my friends developed a project named "LoRi" which was a combination of hardware and software using LoRa modules.We came to this idea while we were thinking of some cool stuffs in order to make for hackathon and we were in need of both fields like hardware and software because in our team 2 of them were specialized in hardware and other two in software so anyways if we are concentrating on a particular field ,2 of them will never contribute anything and will start networking with others😂.

We had done many projects individually as well as in group but haven't done anything yet with this group,so we were thrilled of having our teammates.

At 11:00 am we were about to start the hackathon by Keynote Speech by Zach Latta(CEO & Co-founder,HACK CLUB) & Mike Swift(CEO & Co-founder,MLH). 3 workshops were conducted in between about beginners guide to game development,Github,website creating.

hacking continues....from the start our idea was to do anything on disaster management and after some discussions we reach into LoRa modules .

For completing our project we were in need of some hardware components like LoRa, GSM\NB-IoT , WiFI dev kits (NodeMCU based on popular esp8266).It's very simple to build a NodeMCU platform because it 's based on arduino many members are worked with that before , but the problem with NodeMCU is it based on wifi.

LoRa WAN, LoRa is Powerful network and built specfically for the Connected things that work on low energy and low power, but LoRa wan need a gateway to communicate with server , unfortunately we don’t have a gateway but we planned to do one Lora as node and another module act as gateway to the server . another good thing none of them we worked with LoRa or didn’t get a chance to work with that, so this is the time.

Actually we could implement LoRa in most of technical fields effieciently as they are cheap and need less power consumption.And we have created a firebase server inorder to store and pass data to website.In my view only demerit in these servers is that as our present network speed is limited to 4G and uploading rate will be slow.Otherwise they are also easy to create.

Now this picture depicts the relation and connections between sever,gateway and our modules.

While thinking of an idea,our team was more interested in doing something which would be usefull to the society too,that's how we reach 'LoRi'.And our team was divided into two according to the work they do-Adithya and me was behind hardware,John and Jagath were setting up websites and firebase.

FireBase team was successfully mocked the data using a python script, but they stuck to get data to the backend team.Then they created a website which acts as an interface for that languages used were Html,css,bootstrap,JavaScript.After creating a server we successfully passed the informations to the the backend team via API.

Then using 2 LoRa modules we started working our project,one is for transmission and another is for recieving.These modules will send the exact pin point location as with the transmitter we have connected GSM module and via server that information will be passed to the website,so that the user could see that location in google maps .

We have faced some sort of last minute errors and excluding that it was terrifying.Our 1st judge was Mike and he was impressed with our project,2nd judge-Zach was also impressed with our idea but some confusion were there with our prototype.According to my opinion judgement wasn't so fare as they were looking for something innovating rather than socially responsible one.

Basic connection of nodemcu with a single LoRa and a GSM module

And the first prize was bagged by Sumita yadav and team.It was a Taste simulator and they vary frequency and some terms inorder to change the taste experienced like sour,salty,sweet etc.It was the best hardware project presented in HackCamp 2020,ps:it wasn't said by me but by the Makergram judges🤷‍♂️😂.

Some Networking & Learning happened there:Our total experience from participating this hackathon was lit and made new-new connections and friends from various fields.Our key take aways was the experience and the knowledge that we have acquired from camp.