10 Hacks From Bitcamp
April 8-10, 2016: The University of Maryland hosts Bitcamp, its annual student-run hackathon, for the third year in a row, inviting over 1000 students from all around the United States to come to our campus and hack things up. Here are some of the wonderful hacks your fellow Terps worked on!
1. PeterPantry — Jerry Tan, Thomas Tran, William Zhang, Han Huang, Alex Pu
Best use of Capital One’s API
“ PeterPantry is a software service that generates a comprehensive meal plan that obeys budgetary and preferential constraints. According to Yelp, people who eat out daily spends approximately 300% more than people who cook. We want to use technology to transform the way people dine. PeterPantry is a simple, easy to use web-app that optimizes people’s experience of dining in. We allow users to enter their stylistic preferences, and we’ll scrape the web for the best recipe. There are 2 optimizations in the backend. One of them is pricing optimization. When user entered the % of income they wish to spend weekly for food, our backend optimizes so that the spending is closest to that % income. This way, it optimizes the users experience based on how much they wish to spend. Second optimization is stylistic matching. We want to provide variety to the the user. Our web-app takes in inputs of user preferences, and also optimizes based on user input.”
Tools used: Python, HTML
2. CP Toitles — Michael Wittner, Denver Phillips, Michael Alper, Patrick McNamee, Eli Berger
Best Hack to Serve College Park
“ We wanted to make it easier for people who live in the College Park area to meet up, go to events, and make the community tighter. Our app has two functionalities. First of all, people can look at our map to see what events are going on (via dropped pins). When someone clicks on a pin, they will be able to see what the event is, a description, and where it is. The second part of our app allows people to advertise events by dropping a pin at the location and writing a description….We plan on adding more categories for events, registration for events, and potentially including some sort of social media component.”
Tools used: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Firebase, Google Maps
3. UMD Magnetic Stripe Research — Harsh Baid, Alexander Gould
Cipher Tech’s Best Digital Forensics Related Hack
“ [UMD Magnetic Stripe Research is] an attempt to reverse-engineer the system behind the UMD door locks. We’ve always had twin interests in both security systems and low-level bit coding, so we went looking for some old hardware to hack on early Friday night. We found an old magnetic card reader-writer, and given that UMD continues to insist on using magnetic stripes instead of a more secure system like NFC, we figured there would be potential to exploit the system and gain unauthorized access. Along the way, we hoped to learn more about how magnetic data is stored on credit cards. For the purposes of investigation, we implemented some simple C code that lets us access the reader and read and write pertinent information to one of the card’s the tracks. We also added functionality to quickly copy cards for further research. We then attempted to find a way to manipulate the bits found on a standard student ID (copied onto a hotel room keycard) so that it would gain us access to unauthorized areas on campus.”
Tools used: C, magnets, Linux
4. InstaHealth — David Steinberg, Caeley Looney, Gene Chorba
MLH Best Use of AWS
“Finding a doctor to take care of your medical problems can be a hassle. Specialists are often quite niche and can be difficult to find without a referral from a friend, to even be aware their practice is in the area. InstaHealth aims to simplify this arduous task. Allowing you to search by specialty and locality, a user can easily locate a physician in their area, describe their medical issue, and schedule an appointment.
InstaHealth also allows you to talk to your physician and communicate your problem before you even walk in the door. Your doctor will know exactly what problem you have — no need to describe it to them repeatedly.
Medical hassle doesn’t stop at the discovery phase. You walk into the office, check in on a clipboard or outdated computer system, or bother a receptionist. InstaHealth recognizes when you walk into a participating office and checks you in automatically.
Satisfied? Unhappy with your visit? Leave your physician a review for others to see. Leave feedback for them to improve, or help build a positive public image for their practice.
InstaHealth is the enterprise grade solution for the practical practitioner and ailing individual.”
Tools used: Android, Flask, Python, Amazon Web Services, Firebase, Pebble, Sparkpost, Azure
5. Korrect.me — Teddy Li, Nathan Wolfe, Sean Appleby
Math Works Best Hack Using MATLAB
Korrect.me: “musicalized vocalizations at your fingertips, bridging audio to MIDI.”
How to:
1.) The user hums or sings a song into the recorder.
2.) The backend “midi-izes” the input and pushes out an output. The file recognizes different pitches from the original song.
3.) The backend brings out a midi file that is then played on the website, allowing for a switch to any instrument available.
Tools used: Matlab, HTML5, midi.js API
6. The Perfect Partner — Paul Lanthrop, Ishaan Parikh, Michael Stevens, Ray Tann
“ We were really tired of being so bad at water pong, so we decided to make a robot that would be really good at it. It detects where the cups are, and then launches a ping-pong ball right into it.” Check out the video above to see how it works!
Tools used: Arduino, Romeo, Python, ROS
7. SumCrossword — Tauqir Abdullah, Elias Gonzalez, Ihtesham Chowdhury
SumCrossword is used to summarize webpages into crossword puzzles.
This web application works by “frankensteining” together three python scripts:
- “[It] uses sumy to capture and summarize any webpage into SENTENCES_COUNT sentences.
- Use RAKE (Rapid Automatic Keyword Extraction) to extract the keywords from those sentences
- Use crossword puzzle generator to make the puzzle from the clues previously made
- Parse the crossword output into a canvas drawing
- Enjoy crossword puzzle. Solve it! [Print it out]
- (Anticipated) Share through a generated .html file.”
Tools used: Python
8. Musical LED Lights — Kejin Wang
Musical LED Lights is a hack consisting of “LED lights connected to a raspberry-pi [that] correspond to music input through microphone”. Future plans involve covering an “entire room with LED panels and [hosting] a rave”.
Tools used: Raspberry-Pi, Python
9. Testudo_Alerts — Alexandria BenDabba, David Hagen
Testudo_Alerts is a “Twitter app that aggregates local news from College Park, Maryland. It posts about local news so you can easily see what is going on in College Park. Testudo_Alerts came up from a need to better organize my Google Alerts. I wanted the information, but I didn’t want to have to dig through my emails. I thought what better way to see them than a Twitter Timeline — you can see the general order, can go back to it anytime I want, and I don’t get anymore annoying emails. This uses data from a College Park, MD Google Alert, turned RSS feed, to tweet about local news.”
Tools used: Java, Python
10. Breeze Bruisers — Kevin DiCola, John Murray, Stefan Su
This hack was inspired by the 1990’s arcade game, Windjammers. It’s a “recreation of this classic game which we hold dearly”.
Tools used: C++
For many UMD students, this was the first hackathon ever attended. We hope that this has sparked an interest in hacking for many, and that there are many more innovative creations from fellow Terps to come!
To look at all submissions from Bitcamp, check out the Devpost here.
