10 Hacks from Terrapins: HoyaHacks 2016
January 29th — 31st, 2016: The University of Maryland takes on Georgetown University’s inaugural hackathon, HoyaHacks. The turnout was great, with over 300 students attending in total and UMD itself bringing a full bus + half a metro car of hackers to the event. Here are some of the amazing hacks our fellow Terps built!
1. RE:sign — Marc Estevadeordal, Edwin Tan, Albert Zhang
This hack allows the user to make basic American Sign Language finger spelling gestures above the Leap Motion sensor it was built with, to which the web application will display a visualization of the user’s action and print out the corresponding letter.
According to the group: “[At] every hackathon I typically pack a bunch of random hardware and figure out something to do with it. For example to this Hoya Hacks I brought a couple Arduinos, wires, LED/LCD screens, a Myo armband and a Leap Motion. In the past I’ve been able to smash hardware together with few to minimal actual coding/software involved. I’m proud that this hackathon was different as even though we worked with the Leap Motion (and borrowed another for testing) this was also the first hackathon with further exposure to the software side of things. Personally it was an introduction to JavaScript and web app development and it was a lot of fun to experiment around with.”
Tools used: JavaScript, three.js, HTML, CSS, Leap Motion
2. Datagram — Darpan Shah
This web application allows the user to view their own Instagram statistics by analyzing data outputs from their Instagram posts from the past year and providing personalized account information available by different time intervals, ranging from hourly to yearly.
According to Darpan: “ My initial idea was to authenticate social media with the touch of a fingerprint…however, I was unable to connect Twitter to an Arduino due to Internet and potential firewall settings at the hackathon venue. Hence, I was forced to drop the idea…My another idea was to analyze a company’s or a person’s Twitter account, and create a user-friendly interface where they can monitor their tweets/followers and media, providing statistics and graphical visualization. However, I had again trouble using Twitter’s API, and was unable to get one of the queries...so I decided to analyze another social media platform. Hence, I…[analyzed] Instagram statistics using Python, HTML/JS, and other open source libraries.”
Tools used: Python, Instagram API, HTML, JavaScript, chart.js, CSS
3. VRoom VRoom — Ishaan Parikh, Geena Gao, Ibrahim Hashme, Anthony Castrio, Shyam Patel
Best Hardware Hack
VRoom-VRoom is an immersive user experience that integrates virtual reality via an Oculus Rift. The user controls a miniature vehicle trapped inside a tabletop maze with the objective of finding the treasure hidden at the center of the labyrinth. With a first-person view through Rift, the user guides the vehicle by sending directions through a Myo armband. The user’s movements are translated into instructions for Spark Core which causes the car to move in the direction desired by the user.
According to the group: “We wanted to create an engaging experience for a first-time user of Rift and Myo while providing a fun, simple objective for them to accomplish. This project will encourage new users (including us!) to further explore the growing applications of virtual reality technologies. For example, VRoom-VRoom could be used to inspect spaces that are too small or dangerous for human beings like air conditioning vents or unstable terrain caused by natural disaster. With further development, the use of a Myo Armband could even allow technicians to provide remote repairs and emergency responders to deliver medical treatment and crucial supplies. From a recreational standpoint, activities like VR Drone racing already exist, and many more are popping up. This project suggests the possibility of VR RC Car racing and other mini-vehicle activities.”
Tools used: Arduino, Oculus Rift, Myo Armband, Python
4. Repme — Yoonshik Hong and Justin Ho
Best Use of FiscalNote API
Repme uses a novel algorithm to determine which candidates match the user’s views on important views such as gay marriage, immigration, death penalty, gender equality, etc. The server has parsed almost 100,000 bills proposed in the Congress to analyze the voting patterns of legislators. Simply complete a 20-question survey, and it’ll compute millions of calculations in the backend to find political candidates who support the user on the issues that they most care about.
Tools used: Java, Python, Android, FiscalNote, Digital Ocean
5. InDanger — Vincent Song, Greg Harris, Lev Gorbunov, Lan Tran
The pitch: “Never walk alone in the city.” You’ve heard that before. But you have no friends. Enter InDanger, your geiger counter for local crime. Press a button, and we take public criminal data and rate your immediate locality from a scale of 1–5, with 1 being the safest, and 5 being inner city Detroit. Also, if you’re in enough danger, we’ll even tweet (with your permission) your location so that when you’re brutally mugged and left for dead, your followers will know where to find your body and any valuables the attacker might’ve missed.
How it was built: “We imported criminal record data to a MongoDB server, and created a REST API to interface with it using node/express.js. We created an Android app to send the user’s GPS coordinates to the server, and in turn receive a ‘danger rating’. A website was also created to demonstrate the return values an end user could expect.”
Tools used: Android, node.js, Mongoose, Twitter, HTML, CSS, JQuery, express.js
6. IP Linkr — Brandon Grinkemeyer, Jeffrey Feng, Alexander Jiao, Jason Kim, James Yao
IP Linkr has two sides to it: the first is a program that can be loaded onto any embedded device that is connected to the internet. It works by sending out a ping on the wifi system that the device is connected to through the closest router, and then collecting data on the number of devices connected to the internet through that router. This information is then put onto their website which updates in realtime to provide location, trend, and device-specific data in an aesthetically pleasing manner. This information can then be used to monitor foot traffic or provide extra routers in high usage areas among other things.
According to the team: “ This was a very ambitious project for a team of freshmen. Each stage of development presented its own challenges. It took us a while to decide on this project, along with what applications it could possibly have. Then we had the challenge of figuring out how to send out pings through the code that we wrote in Python. This was novel to all of us, and we started out with no idea how it would be done, or even that it could be done. Even as that was being figured out, other members of the team were writing algorithms to parse through the large amounts of complex data that the ping would return. Creating a website that was both pleasing to the eye and able to effectively present the info was challenging as well. Formatting everything was a huge challenge that took hours of tinkering in order to get right.”
Tools used: Python, HTML, Raspberry-Pi, CSS, Flask, JavaScript, Plotly, Intel-Edison
7. Stay Calm & Panic — David Steinberg, 3 non-UMD hackers
Beeck Center: Best Social Innovation
BAH: best Internet of Things hack
Optum 360: Best potential to improve health
The pitch: You’re panicking at the disco and writing both sins and tragedies is in the cards when the deck’s stacked against you. Panic attacks are serious and unavoidable, like global warming. Being aware that you’re undergoing a panic attack is a huge aspect to combating the attack.
Our application monitors heart rate and can offer therapeutic responses like calming music or funny cat gifs. It also produces a log for your physician, because reporting panic attacks can be a huge hassle with a lot of paperwork. Panic attacks suck like a Dyson. We’re trying to bring that down to a dust buster.
Check out more about the team and their hack here!
Tools used: Android, Web App, Twitter, HTML, CSS, Python, Twilio, Flask
8. Whisp — Jack Qian, Justin Pan, Andy Soo Hyun Moon, Jack Dai, Peter Wang
Whisp is an Andoid app that allows its users to anonymously leave a short sound bit called a “whisper” hidden in a location. Other users who come near the location can listen to the whispers left by others. Whether it’s funny, information, trivial, or completely random, anyone can post whispers anywhere! Users can upvote and downvote whispers, and popular whispers can grow into “shouts.”
Tools used: Android, Java, XML
9. Project 0 — Jenny Mandl, Noah Todd, Alec Beri, David Kaplan
This team programmed a delta robot to play a human in Tic Tac Toe. The user inputs the space they want to move to, and the Tic Tac Toe algorithm responds with the most optimal possible move.
According to the team: “We ran into a few challenges which causes minor numerical errors [in the robot] which we were able to fix. We are really proud that the robot works and we’ve learned how to make these technologies work together really well. In the future, Delta robot will operate off image processing and play autonomously with the user input being a regular pen and paper game versus the computer input. It will feel just like playing a friend!”
Tools used: Arduino, Python, C, Delta robot
10. Major Way — Justin Chávez, Ana Ortez-Rivera, Jaime Orellana, Sabbir Ahmed
General Assembly: Best Education Hack
Major Way parses in the four-year curriculum of the user’s intended major, and extracts all the courses and scans through their respective summaries using the Wikipedia API to generate intersection graphs of the most relevant subtopics to the field to finally tally them all up into a simple pie chart.
According to the team, this hack was inspired by the personal experience of enrolling in STEM majors. “Once enrolled, students like us were blindsided with courses that had intricate course names. Who knew that computer science requires so much math? Well, we found that out the hard way. If only other students like us who dream of pursuing STEM majors could use a service that outlines all the different areas of study that they’ll encounter in their major. Oh wait, now there is!”
For more information describing the project, click here.
Tools used: Python, JavaScript, Bootstrap, JQuery, Flask, Natural Language Processing
For most, Hoya Hacks was the first hackathon of 2016— and for some (including myself!), the first hackathon ever — marking a fabulous start to a semester sure to be filled with innovation and creativity.
To look at all submissions at Hoya Hacks, check out the Devpost here.
