Team BigDataRebels at Dutch Open Hackathon 2016
Friday December 9th through Sunday 11th the third edition of the Dutch Open Hackathon was held. The premise of the hackathon: Connect technology enthusiasts with real-life companies, lock them up for the weekend and see what great ideas they can turn into prototypes.
This year’s edition was organized in collaboration with Dutch companies and public organizations: KLM, Philips, Schiphol, PostNL, the Dutch Police and the Dutch Chamber of Commerce. All these organizations made several open data APIs available to encourages the participants to use them in their hackathon projects. Teams had to chose from four “tracks”: Doing Business, In the City, On the Go and At Home.
Colleague and Android developer Danny Lamarti brought a few others from Elements together and formed a kick-ass team: team BigDataRebels, consisting of Maksymilian, Kaira, Yahia and of course Danny. Wouter joined for moral support.
Friday afternoon the Rebels drove to Rotterdam to register and install themselves in the awesome coworker office space of CIC Rotterdam in the Groothandelsgebouw next door of Rotterdam Central Station. It turned out that over 250 people showed up at the hackathon and over 50 teams were formed. Wow!
The Rebels came up with a great project idea: Create a grid of sensors monitoring air quality in the city and build a mobile app that gathers the data and visualizes it. It would give users insight in the current air quality of their city. Team BigDataRebels obviously picked the track “In the City”.
During the course of the 48 hour hackathon our favorite team, the BigDataRebels, created an Android app using the GeoDan API to plot the data on a map. Using gas detection sensors, a LoPy board and the LoRa gateway they brought the guys were able to create a working proof of concept. Using a lighter the guys were able to test air “pollution” and demonstrate that the system was working.
Danny reported that the nights at the CIC office space became pretty cold as the heating system did not work after the guys covered the motion detector to disable the office lights to be able to sleep in darkness. Such sacrifices the guys made in the name of innovation!
On Sunday afternoon the big winner of the Dutch Open Hackathon 2016 was announced: Team RE: SOFTWARE with their “Find It” app that helps you find lost items by using the public. Their great app makes use of the stolen goods API of the Dutch Police, the GeoDan API and the PostNL barcode generator API.
Congratulations to the winning team!
Team BigDataRebels posted their app, named AirQ, on Google Play.
Loaded with new experience, team BigDataRebels will try again next week, at Elements’ very own hackathon!
Originally published at www.elements.nl on December 11, 2016.
