Hack Day Awards – part 1

Margaret Gold

Best Science Hack

Paul Tanner with Jatrobot – photo credit Luis Abreu

The winner of the Best Science Hack award was Team Hyperiron (Hercules Fisherman, Paul Tanner, Sarah Mount & Nikita Korotaev) for their entry Jatrobot:

“In view of impending shortage of food, to build sustainability, we would like to deploy as many sensors as possible to get realtime feedback of plantation and the land they grown on.

We employ various mobile or stationary sensors to collect realtime data to a central server together with historical data that is collected along with other third-party data, such as weather forecasts, to determine or recommend suitable nutritional need at required resolution on the ground.The alerts can be sent via choice of methods SMS, email, twitter or Voxeo.

In time we would have historical analysis of the data where we could compare with other data collected and suggest best course of action, we would also take into account the weather forecasts for instance to plan watering level needed or nutritional values as we are sampling the time and location of the sensor reading this allows us to target more granular level possible. “

Hercules has posted more about Jatrobot on his blog, as has Paul on his blog, and their slides are on Slideshare.
The team won  LEGO Mindstorm Kits, donated by LEGO, and a Nokia Lumia 800, donated by Nokia.

Best User Experience

William & William – photo credit Steve Karmeinsky

The Best User Experience award went to Team Glitch (William Morland ) for his entry Pepin:

“There are glitches in the matrix all around us but so far there is no fun instinctive way to share them. If you see a funked up ATM then of course you want to tell your friends (and possibly the bank) but that isn’t a natural thing for a normal user and it certainly isn’t fun.”

William won a Blackberry PlayBook, donated by Blackberry.

 

Best use of Open APIs / Open Data

The Best use of Open APIs / Open Data award went to Team Glitch (William Morland ) for his entry Pepin:

“There are glitches in the matrix all around us but so far there is no fun instinctive way to share them. If you see a funked up ATM then of course you want to tell your friends (and possibly the bank) but that isn’t a natural thing for a normal user and it certainly isn’t fun.”

William won a Samsung Galaxy SII, donated by Samsung.

Best Android Entry

There were three winners for the Best Android Entry:

Tom Hume – photo credit Martin Cunningham

Tom Hume for It’s Good to Talk:

Phone calls are more than the sum of their parts: the act of making a call is a demonstration that you’re thinking of someone. Inspired by the Bob Hoskins-voiced BT adverts of the 1980s, this Android app does one very simple thing: whenever you phone one of your Facebook friends, it silently posts posts that fact onto Facebook. It’s either a public declaration of care that goes beyond just clicking “like”, or one step further towards a world without privacy, depending on how you feel about this sort of thing…”

Terence Eden for Bletchley Sonata:

“Music of the spheres – a melodious journey through the environment. A piece of music so sumblime it defies all explanation!”

For samples of the music, listen to Jamillah Knowles’ interview with Terence Eden on the BBC Radio 5 Outriders programme (the last interview on the clip). Team Intohand (Matt Rollings, Tom Durrant, Elliot Long and Kieran Gutteridge) for Live Quiz:

“The idea involves a general quiz game with a twist – it’s not just played in parallel with each person on a phone, but they are playing together, getting each question simultaneously, plus information about how the other players are doing on the same quiz. Entry into the quiz is as simple as scanning a QR code. It is a cross-platform app, running on iPhone, Android Mobile and Android tablet.”

Terence, Tom & Thibaut – photo credit Steve Karmeinsky

Each individual won:

 

 Best iOS Entry

The Best iOS Award went to Team SDK Dub Remix (Kieran Gutteridge and Chris Ross) for their entry Stop Blocking the Beats:

“Our survey says there is grave situation in the Facebook iOS SDK.  We hunted the native OTA Facebook engineers and once caught, we explained our thoughts in a highly pleasant and structured fashion. Voices were only raised in excitement and jubilation.  The result of the conversation with our now great mates, was a hearty challenge to look into solving some of our grievances. So we did.

Our course of attack was to boldly go, where no developer has gone before, and rewrite the Facebook client SDK for iOS. We have a readme at https://github.com/hiddenmemory/facebook-ios-sdk/blob/master/README.md which details the technical changes we have made. We did see Alice, she sends her regards.”

Kieran and Chris won the O’Reilly books: Programming iOS 5, Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript , and Learning iOS Programming, donated by O’Reilly Media.

 

 Best Windows Phone Entry

Team Wendy – photo credit Martin Cunningham

The Best Windows Phone Award went to Team Wendy (Matt O’Keefe, Dexter Dillinger, Laura Sanders, Trent Walton, Claire Scantlebury, and Matt Hunt) for their entry How Many Beers:

“Track what your friends are drinking including measurements and the chosen consuming technique.”

Each team member received a Lumia 800 , donated by Nokia. The winning team also received the books Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Developer Guide, Programming Windows Phone 7 – Silverlight Edition, and Programming Windows Phone 7 – XNA Framework Edition,  Building the Real Time User Experience, Tapworthy, and Gamification by Design, donated by O’Reilly Media.

 

Best Game Entry

Dom & Heather – photo credit Martin Cunningham

The winner of the Best Game Award was Team Recently Engaged (Dom Hodgson and Heather Burke) for I Hope This Works:

“Conferences, Hack Days, Barcamps and other events where you need to get a bunch of people into a room and tell them to sit quietly whilst someone finds an mac connector for the right model.. no not that mac.. the latest mac.. anyway where was I?

Yes, We’ve built a hack to entertain and provide some must needed distraction for the audience throughout the day. If it actually works…”

Dom and Heather each won a Corona Pro subscription  (a value of $349 per year), donated by Ansca Mobile.

Best Use of Other Features: Bluetooth, NFC, RFID and of course Messaging

The winner of the Best Use of Other Features Awards was  Team Hyperiron (Hercules Fisherman, Paul Tanner, Sarah Mount & Nikita Korotaev) for their entry Jatrobot (See the Best Science Hack award above for more details.)
Hercules has posted more about Jatrobot on his blog, as has Paul on his blog, and their slides are on Slideshare.
The team won a “Goodie Bag of Geekery”, which included a Crumpler bag, a mifi, a fitbit, solar charger & other small electronic gadgets like headphones, & healthy edibles – all donated by Blue Via.

Best Hardware Hack

Emily – photo credit Steve Karmeinsky

The winners of the Best Hardware Hack award were Team Umbicord (Sandor Toth) for his entry Umbicord:

“This project is a multiple development. Once you install the app on your Andorid phone, you are able to read QR codes. If you read the QR code, activity is generated on your Facebook timeline, and at the same time the server stores your QR code. An embedded controller polls the server via Vodafone 3G and makes your decision live (eg. switch on something).Where can it be successful? On events if you have a tilt with 3 different QR codes, symbolise 3 different activity or product. The visitor scans the QR code, creates social activity for the event and at your stand as well.“
and Team Robohack (Emily & George Tilley) for their entry Fred:
“a 12 year old girl showed off her hack that used the light from an iphone to set off a robot to throw items (which amusingly flew into the audience and hit a few prime coders)” – Jamillah Knowles, The Next Web.
Each team member won a LEGO Mindstorm Kit, donated by LEGO, and share the O’Reilly books  Arduino Cookbook, Making Things See, Make a Mind-Controlled Arduino Robot, Environmental Monitoring with Arduino, and Getting Started with .NET Gadgeteer, donated by O’Reilly Media.

 

Best Mobile Web / HTML5 Entry

The winner of the Best Mobile Web Award was Threedom (Matt Oakes, Rob Douglas & Luis Abreu) for their entry Boot to Threedom:

“Making a simple 3-button interface for B2G”

Read more about the Threedom interface on which this hack was based on the Ribot blog.

 The Team won the O’Reilly books jQuery Mobile,  Mobile Design Pattern Gallery,  Designing Mobile InterfacesHTML5: Up and Running,  HTML5 Cookbook, and HTML5 and CSS3, donated by O’Reilly Media.

Best Tablet Entry

The winner of the Best Tablet Award was Team QRtists (Tristan Roddis and Nigel Crawley) for their entry QR Codebreakers:

“Multiplayer game where players scan QR codes to reveal a scrambled word. They must then switch to ‘decypt’ mode and re-scan in the correct order to solve the anagram.”

Tristan and Nigle won the O’Reilly books iPad: The Missing Manual,  Motorola Xoom: The Missing Manual, and iPad programming , donated by O’Reilly Media.