This weekend, I was able to attend the Kent, OH, Hackathon. These events are put on by Major League Hacking and are generally held on college campuses. They are free to students, and are backed, supported, sponsored, and powered by a large variety of companies seeking to foster ingenuity and creative ideas. While there, participants are supplied with materials to build with, food, rooms to work, and a place to sleep. As a participant, you are able to attend talks and a variety of panels covering various topics, or are free to work through the weekend. The purpose of the event is to inspire the youth to invent and innovate with technology, and create something new.
We arrived at the event on Friday evening, where they shuffled us into the auditorium of the school so we could meet other people for teams and ideas. After listening to the speakers and dinner, we found a room to work in. At 9:00 pm the hack commenced.
My team consisted of my friends: Nikolai -- who was in charge of developing software; Liam -- who built the hardware; and myself, who did networking, built the web server, and aided Nikolai in software development. Upon arrival, we added a fashion student, Abigail, to the team. Abigail designed the fashion aspect of the project.
Starting our project: we unpacked our boxes and threw them away like other people should have. The four of us split up and began to develop the different aspects of the project. What was our amazing project? It was an ingenious collaboration of minds to create a mesh network that could be stored in any piece of clothing as wearable tech and interact with our other products. The ability to connect to other devices allowed for an 'in the moment mesh' for socializing with those around you. It is similar to SnapChat, except that you have to be within close proximity to another person for the tech to work.
This project creates a temporary social media platform to share pictures and media, as well as secure SSH peer-to-peer chat rooms, with those around you. The idea is to create a local network in the effort to live life through the views of those around you and to allow for you to truly connect with these people on and off of the screen.
We want you to see and hear what others hear. We want you to meet those around you. We want you to connect. We want you to mesh.
The difficulties we encountered though in building the network was a nightmare. The OS we were using did not recognize the capability for our WiFi cards to create a network between. The other difficulty was building the messaging platform, because no one had experience in building an application like that.
But we improvised. We learned. And we developed.
We managed to develop a functioning platform with messaging capabilities and connectability with the other products.
//caramon
