On “Disrupting”- The troubles of doing crazy things at a hackathon

Things don’t always go according to plan, if they do, the things you’re doing are too easy.

Intro

So I've gained a bit of a reputation in the Hackathon Hacker community, which I really consider a good thing: my reputation is being know for coming up an executing some incredibly ambitious and slightly insane hacks that most people wouldn't even think of.

This turns out to have both positive and negative elements, for example, positive: everyone tries to help those crazy ideas happen, but negative: those ideas are inherently risky and my success rate isn't what I wish it could be.

Anyways, I just wanted to share my awesome MHacks V experience, which involved a lot of the problems which you bump into when making a truly disruptive project, and how everything could go wrong and how even then you should always try to pull it back together, so here it is.

My original planned hack had been to make a very small 3d projector that worked together with a project tango and a drone and if we had time, a leapmotion to in real time map and display an area in 3d, but not everything went as planned.

On Pivoting

Things just didn't go that way though, because after we had done many of the things we planned, we realized that a tiny 5 mm diagonal LCD we were planning to use was for no good reason, not responding to our data input. I spent a few hours trying to figure out what was wrong, testing the circuit as much as I could… but it was all in vain.. at 4 am on Saturday morning, things weren't looking great already.

My teammates decided I was wasting too much time on this, so we decided to try to be more flexible. We decided that if we couldn't make a small one, we’d make a HUGE one, namely, one larger than anything I've made or seen. This turned out to be a good idea, since we ended up building one that had 6 times the projection volume of anything else similar.

So we pivoted and had to redesign everything from scratch.

Pivoting Is Not Easy

When you pivot, you dump what you had in mind and move to change something… this seems like a simple concept until you realize that it means everything has to be planned all over again. We spent the next two hours planning a new version, and then we caught an Uber to go to a store and get some parts we didn't have on hand.

Wait, you think things are going well?

Well… we didn't find everything we needed when we took that trip. Two hours later, we came back with nothing more than a cable to show for it. We needed materials for a whole structure, a cylinder and a lot of other stuff, and we didn't have what we needed.

So we decided to try to take advantage of resources we had available: We went to see if we could laser cut and 3d print some of the things we need, this would have been great.. if we could find the person responsible for them. 5 hours and every time we showed up at the hardware table, those people had seemingly “just left”. Eventually, around 1 pm Saturday, we found the people we needed, and started working.

Things were finally starting to look up, the materials were coming together, and we came back at 5 pm with most of the parts we needed to make things happen, thinking things were going well, until we found out that the software team in our project was having trouble because some data they were getting just wasn’t working properly.

Everything seemed ok, we hot glued some acrylic together to try to make it watertight, we set up some mirrors in the configuration we planned, and some were working, and things seemed ok… until we added water.

Water is very funny in that it finds holes you never knew existed to piss you off with. Especially in a container where every edge was in a quarter inch of hot glue. Our acrylic container was leaking. We spent an hour and a half frantically trying to seal it up.. and despite that, everything STILL LEAKED. We weren't doing so well, things just didn't make sense… on top of that, the tiny little fans we were using, seemed to be only working sometimes.

Once again, things looked bleak: Software wasn’t moving along, hardware was suffering problem after problem, we were all tired, sleepy, and annoyed.

Making it Happen Anyways

I’m going to be honest, every hardware hack I've done, I've really hoped to make something that’s clean and doesn't look like it was made from random things we had lying around, and let me tell you, I've yet to have that happen even once. Everything looks and feels janky.

We decided to start solving problems in ways that worked even if they looked terrible: we found a garbage bag to line the acrylic, and we duct taped the fans together to keep them working right. We put mirrors on cardboard floats and started moving them around, and for software, we found out that the documentation listed our problem with the project tango as a “known issue” so there was no solution.

We started to change directions around our obstacles just like the water had done a few hours ago.

Things came together more when we helped each other, the hardware people gave the software people a fresh set of eyes, and the software people helped the hardware people. At 6 am Sunday, we had a largely functioning device, and the software was coming together. We all worked on setting it up, and at the 11th hour, things finally came together and more or less worked, though they weren't perfect.

But Wait! There’s More!

Think everything is going well? That we demoed and that everything went well and all our troubles were done when hacking ended?

The biggest disappointment is when you try to show something that works and it inexplicably stops doing so the moment you try to show it to someone… It’s like you can’t simultaneously have something that works and something that is presentable, kinda like a hack uncertainty principle.

The problem happened just a few minutes after demos started, our two stabilizing ducted fans inexplicable stopped working. I frantically looked for what the problem was, first I thought it was power, but alas it wasn’t, and I had no idea what was wrong, until, after nearly 30 minutes of looking while my team presented I realized that my arduino mini wasn’t replying to commands I sent over serial with a confirmation that I’d put in for testing purposes, at which point, between first round and second round demos, I ran back to the room and got a normal arduino as a replacement and uploaded that sketch and it all worked again.

But wait. It couldn't last, because another 10 minutes into second round demos, we ran out of battery. Thankfully, we were able to get another battery to use, and everything finally worked again properly, miraculously proceeding to work through second round demos and the final presentations, making the final presentations the only thing that actually worked without any problems.

Wrapping Up

Making something cool is hard. Many people downplay the hard parts and act like everything came together easily, but never let problems discourage you. My team could have fallen apart and decided it was hopeless, but we never did. We worked together and never gave up, no matter how bleak it looked, no matter what resources we seemed to lack.

The lesson here, is that no matter how many issues there are, we can still surprise people and succeed (something Nick Quinlan pointed out). Never give up, even when things seem to really want to fall apart, remember, the universe is always for having more entropy, things are supposed to fall apart, making them happen is a struggle no matter what, don’t expect it to happen easily.

Any time you make something new and exciting, you need to believe in it, no matter how bleak things seem, or they’ll become even more bleak.

In the end, everything came together, and my team made the top 10 of MHacks V, despite the universe doing all it could to make us fail.

Shoutouts

Shoutout to my AMAZING teammates this weekends at MHacks V, Jessy Lin, Ryan Strat, Alex LaGrassa, and Casey Spencer. Despite what any of them individually might think about not contributing enough, I've said it a thousand times and will say it again, you were all amazing, each and every one of you put in an incredible amount of work, and this would have failed if we were missing even one of you.

Shoutout also to the MHacks V team, specifically Vikram, Colin, and Tom, the event was amazing, well run, the food lines were multithreaded, the hardware available was great, and this would never have happened if you all hadn't helped and made it happen, it was a memorable event in every way, keep doing what you’re doing and giving people like me a chance to make things like this.