Ideas unleashed by Seeedhackathon!
Get together a bunch of coders and funny people and mix in fruits and energy drinks over the course of a day. There you have it—the ingredients for a hackathon. More specifically, Seeed’s HackForWindows Day.
At the Seeed Shenzhen office, 24 people gathered to create funny and functioning decoration based on the glass wall along the corridor. Since moving to our new office in Xili, we still have some blank glass wall undecorated. HackForWindows is an opportunity for creativity and self-expression on experiences that make our working environment better. It encourages all hackers at Seeed to keep the concerns of office environment in mind as they work on their projects.
Teams formed a week ago and most of the ideas are pitched, there were originally 11 ideas and eventually that number was whittled down to four teams with four different ideas. The whole four projects are: Maker Garder, Windows, Light the World Map, and Nest.
Participants arrived at 9 a.m. and gathered in office to start making.
Guoqun Xu may be a software programmer in his day job, but he also likes using technology to make things that he can hold in his hands.
Chao Zhang, designer of ‘Nest’, saying like other comptitive projects, Nest was born from problems. “But it feels great to make your own stuff and give back to the community,” he added.
Chao Gang is reinforcing the PMMA board with cloud design pattern on the glass wall. During the final demonstrations, groups unveiled their products.
One team developed an interaction wall called ‘Maker Garden’. Maker Garden aims at raising the awareness of recycling, therefore, it is consist of discarded plastic bottles. There are some LEDs inside the bottles that are connected to Arduino board to make them sensor lights. Moreover, to highlight the maker spirit, it has been empowered with different elements, such as classical comic characters, logo of some open source hardware. See how it’s done on recipe
Another project presented at the HackForWindows Day called “Windows”can forecast weather. In this project, it is using 2 Wio Link to control RGB Led strip and a Grove – Ultrasonic Ranger as well as a Grove – Recoder. We can get the weather status and temperature by the lighten weather icon and the RGB Led strip. The designer ran a python script on my VPS and got the weather information from internet. See how it’s done on recipe
When you stand a long time (about 10 seconds) before the Wio Link, It’ll say hello to you from the recoder.
The project called “Light the World Map” won the day. It is created by Nosk wu, Lu Weicong, Dingding Yang, Chaosheng He. It shows the places of Seeed’s Franchises.Distribution by 2016 with RGB LED on the global map. Acrylic cutting with world map, plus the LEDs one the back, control them with seeeduino. See how it’s doneon recipe.
Winners received cash bonus as prizes, and, of course, the freedom to openly gloat or humblebrag as much as they please.
With the success of Seeed’s HackForWindows Day, James Zeng, who participated the internal hackathon for the first time, said that he is very interested in another hackathon next time.
“This whole experience has taught me that our company is full of creative people, dream big, then willing to commit time and effort to bring something new to the office,” said James Zeng, “How cool is that?”
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