The First Hackathon Experience #HackTM2016
It has passed approximately two months from my first hackathon experience, the #HackTM2016 from Timisoara. This delay I’m publishing this article is mostly because of the release period to the job and other personal stuff I had to do.
This experience was a reminder of my high school programming competitions where I have attended with different applications written in the already ancient Turbo Pascal 7.0 or Borland C++ 3.1. At that moment, probably because of my high school informatics great teachers, the competitive spirit between colleagues was so intense and we have competed for each other in creating applications within the local competitions and in other cities from the country.
This year, the hackathon competition from Timisoara was between 20 – 22 May 2016 to the UPT Restaurant, Timisoara and from my point of view it was a great event. The event had categories such eHEALTH, Robots, Smart City, GameDev, IoT, Education, Fintech and Open but no Automotive category as I expected according to previous pitching sessions.
Before the effective event, I have attended in two pitching sessions seeing different challenging proposals in few domains. The most appealing were some ideas of the ADAS team from Continental, a team I was apart between 2006-2008 (Siemens VDO department, video camera projects at that time).
Even if I had no team, because of curiosity, I bought the ticket and I went to the hackathon pitching session, trying to figure a team and to decide a project to deal with.
The Continental ADAS team came with hardware and software support how to hack their platform.
We were able to find a small team, first by two persons and later for a period five persons. Unfortunately, those last three persons left us while realizing that the project is not what they have imagined initially, that other projects look more challenging or that their knowledge was not matching with what it was required for our project.
So, I installed on my laptop some software used internally by the ADAS team and we took a ride to record real traffic data. Once we had this data, the effective programming for grabbing it can be done in office conditions.
The idea
Having the radar and camera information, GPS data and vehicle dynamics, we were thinking is that in the near future, even before self-driving cars on the common roads, this information might be sent in the cloud to be used by the traffic management solutions in order to be optimized the traffic. Even these days, in my city, Timisoara, such traffic management solution is implemented but is not based on cars internal information. Maybe, this idea will not be applied.
What we have done – the effective experience
So, faced with this challenge, me and my teammate Nikola Kolevski, a Serbian nice guy, have started the work on Friday evening. We have met on that pitching meeting and we had a great cooperation. I was the back-end guy and he the man from the cloud. Because we “spoke” different languages, me C++ and he Python, we have decided to speak the REST way.
During our job, we have improvised the “project management” with a Trello board. Of course, we used GitHub for source control.
What I effectively had to do it was to inject some code within a .DLL that was loaded into a Continental application and sent the ADAS information in the cloud. Nicola was the guy that received and collected the data. Unfortunately, even if we tried few times, we found no front-end available teammate, just some with slices of time in terms of availability.
I decided to use the benefits of asynchronous programming and I used the Casablanca REST API. But because of the Continental’s Visual Studio 2012 project constraints (!!!), during the Friday evening, I faced up with the challenge to find and adapt a Casablanca library older version to the project. The latest Casablanca’s versions are available for VS 2013 and VS 2015 only. Thanks to NuGet tool, I finally managed to get and use the 1.10 version.
On Saturday we managed the effective work, faced with some challenges related to the TCP/IP communication between our applications because of some Python server configuration, but finally, our applications were able to talk each other via REST services, in the night and I have tweeted.
Sending #ADAS data in the #Cloud to @developer94 https://t.co/Vio5UphYrZ #hacktm #hackathon
— Silviu Ardelean (@silviuardelean) 22 mai 2016
After a sleep break, next morning we did some last code adjustments and being time constrained we tried to improvise a frontend. Also, we had a second trip with the Continental’s Mercedes car to test what we did, using a 4G network.
As usual for a hackathon, everything was on the run with adrenaline, so quite nice! At the end of the hackathon, we had to prepare for the hackathon jury’s visit and later for presentation because we have qualified in the first three teams in the Robots section. Yeah, we were included there because the Automotive category did not exist, but it was fine. 🙂
The truth is that the Continental was the only automotive represented company even if there are many such companies in Timisoara, but it seems they are not interested in such events.
Other interesting things from #HackTM2016
Attending to #HackTM2016 was a great experience, I have seen many interesting projects but from far the most exciting one was the Symme 3D Printer, a local start-up.
Conclusions
In an internet of things world, our based idea might connect the cars ADAS information with intelligent management future systems to improve the traffic flow in big cities.
It is obvious but I want to underline: if you want to have success in a hackathon, try having a core team before the event. Otherwise, you might just have fun coding but not ending the prototype. Strategies of being efficient would be a great asset.
Meeting new people and trying to do something from the scratch in a limited time is a very cool thing even if you don’t have time to write optimized and tested code. Also, you might learn a lot of new things.
Definitely, I will repeat this experience in the future!
