CalHacks 2014
This past weekend Wit was proud to be at CalHacks at UC Berkeley for another wild and crazy weekend of hacking and mentorship. CalHacks was the largest hackathon ever with over 1800 hackers, mentors and sponsors packing California Memorial Stadium and over 200 hacks were presented at the end of the weekend.
Hackers working in the stadium plaza under the stars.
We saw some awesome hacks over the course of the hackathon and we were stoked to see so many teams thinking about the future of the internet of things. Our Grand Prize for Best Overall Use of the Wit.ai API went to Jarvis, a voice controlled home automation hack. Jarvis was created by solo hacker Ivan Smirnov using a Moto 360, an Intel Edison board and some relays to control power to three 120v devices. Not only was Ivan working solo, it was his first time hacking on hardware and he totally killed it. Great work, Ivan! Enjoy your new Pebble Steel!
Ivan won our API Grand Prize with his home automation hack, Jarvis.
Picking a winner was hard, though. We saw a lot of other great hacks using Wit.ai. Some of the other cool projects we saw were:
- Where Yat? — An email based location sharing app that uses Wit.ai to help coordinate meetings between friends.
- Shelldon — A voice activated shell interface for OS X.
- OrderBot — A food delivery app where you send a natural language text message about what you want to eat and the app will manage the ordering and delivery.
Over 200 hacks were on display in expo on Sunday.
Congratulations to all of the hackers and especially to the organizers of CalHacks. It was a crazy fun event and we’re looking forward to the next one!
Team Wit