NJIT Hackathon Produces Hardware, Software and Cloud Solutions in 24 Hours
At HackNJIT, held on November 7-8, students from New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark) joined with students from other colleges and universities to develop some interesting projects during the 24-hour marathon. The teams made use of APIs provided by sponsors such as Prudential (Newark), Linode (Galloway), Juniper Networks OpenLab (Bridgewater) and ADDTEQ (Princeton). The teams with the best solutions were awarded tablets, cash prizes and medals.
Winners included:
1. First Place
- CardiAudio – As you run, it taps into your accelerometer and calculates your current velocity. It then classifies it into one of four categories, and “plays no audio if you’re going too slow, really awful quality audio if you’re going slightly faster, a kinda crappy quality version if you’re going at an okay speed, and full quality if you’re going at your best speed.”
- Participants: Matt Young and Richard Rakus.
- Major League Hacking (MLH) Prize: Medal and Dell Venue 10 tablet for each member of the team.
2. Second Place
- TwitchPlaysMelee – Reads Twitch (http://twitch.tv) chat and converts it into commands to control the game Super Smash Bros. Melee.
- Participants: Brandon Ruggles, Joseph Delgado, Dante Urso and John Moreira.
- MLH Prize: Medal for each member of the team.
3. Third Place
- Chillflix – Lets you search Kat.cr (the popular torrent site) and stream videos from that site to any supported device. In addition, it allows the user to chat anonymously with connected anonymous peers.
- Participants: Binoy Patel
- MLH Prize: Medal for each member of the team.
Special Prize Winners
1. Best Use of Linode Services
- ShortView – The server daemon records load statistics at an interval on a local MongoDB to be picked up by the web client, displaying the statistics graphically.
- Prize: Raspberry Pi 2 for each member of the team.
- Participants: Matthew Lavine and Trevor Summerfield.
2. Best Use of an ADDTEQ API
- StudyBuddy – Helps students form study groups or find study groups located nearby, discuss questions and answers, share files, and study together. Upon the creation of a new group, a unique online HipChat is created for that group, customized for enhancing the study experience.
- Prize: $500 for the entire team.
- Participants: Shruti Kulkarni, Benedict Waiharo, Md Islam and Roberto Arias-Yacupoma.
3. FDM Group (New York, N.Y.) Most Innovative Project
- CardiAudio – See above.
- Prize: $500 for the entire team.
- Participants: Matt Young and Richard Rakus.
4. FDM Group Best User Interface
- Project Reach – A story-based learning experience that revolves around children answering questions posed by different characters. Answering the questions correctly furthers the story line.
- Prize: $500 for entire team
- Participants: Abhi Sesh, Ashish Mirji and Tyler Roach.
5. FDM Group Best Overall Hack
- ShortView – See above.
- Prize: $1,000 for the entire team
- Participants: Matthew Lavine and Trevor Summerfield.
6. MLH Best Use of AWS (Amazon Web Services)
- CardiAudio – See above.
- Prize: 1TB hard drive for each member of the team.
- Participants: Matt Young and Richard Rakus.
An NJIT spokesperson reported that the sponsors seemed very happy with how the event went overall.
“Prudential seemed to be having a great time with their games all night. ADDTEQ enjoyed having plenty of people come up and try out their bow-and-arrow game. The Linode representatives seemed happy with both ShortView and TwitchPlaysMelee. The people from Viacom seemed to enjoy having people come up to their booth and mess around with their virtual reality setup. Overall, it seemed like everyone enjoyed themselves.”
