Auto Contact Exchange

Robert Rouhani, Zayed Simjee

What are you building?

“An app for Android that as soon as you enter a new contact, it sends that person a message with your contact information.”

Small hackathons vs large hackathons?

“I’ve been to Hacktech and HackUCI among others. For the larger one, our idea was super ambitious and we just poured all of our time into it so we didn’t have time to really walk around and ask people what they were building. Here we had some free time so we walked around and saw the other hardware hacks, which was really awesome.”

You’re a serial hacker. What got you into hackathons?

“A few of my friends had gone to HackMIT. They also wanted to go to YHack and we just stuck together and kept going to hackathons and building cool things together.”

Why do you keep coming back to hackathons?

“It’s those last few hours when you’re really tired but everything comes together. It’s just very exciting at the very end when what you’ve been working on for the past 36 hours finally works and all of your hard work is worth it.”

Favorite hardware to hack?

“Arduino. The barrier for entry with Arduino is nothing. Earlier this year, I got a grid of 8x8 LEDs and I took a shield that read audio data from an auxilary jack. I ran a fast fourier transform on it and displayed that on a grid of LEDs.”

Is hardware hacking easy to get into?

“Honestly, it sucks that there isn’t anything simple to introduce people to hardware like what exists now for software. But it doesn’t matter because if you keep fooling around with stuff and have helpful people around you at hackathons, it just start working.”