I again attended HackRU at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. We left early Saturday morning around 8:15am and arrived around 12:30pm–much better than arriving late like last semester. Swift himself handed the Rensselaer Hackathon Organization official MLH “jerseys” which were complete with last names and numbers as well as the glorious ‘tute screw on the front.

I went into HackRU with the intention of casual working on the Hacks-out-of-a- Hat Sorting Hat device. However, after talking with Josh, plans changed and we were going full throttle. Josh built a back-end web service to complete with an API and mysql database. I focused on the front-end hardware (as I planned to originally). This web database made my job easier because I no longer had to managed all of the data on the data logging shield on the Arduino, which was painful due to the Arduino’s small RAM.

Sebastian generously donated some of his hardware (though this project is for RHO anyway) and significant advice and expertise. I knew minimal Arduino/circuits stuff before this, so this turned out to be a great learning experience.

In the end, I worked all through the night on the project, finally collapsing around quarter of 8 in the morning for about an hour. This is the point where I gave up trying to use BlueTooth and switched to serial USB communication instead. (I think the board just had too many serial in/outs going at once. I will look into this problem more later.) Hacking ended at 12pm, at which point I had finished all I could do and took a quick half hour nap. The “science fair”, as HackRU called it, began at about 2pm. It was quite crowded as everyone gathered at his/her assigned tables to show off the projects. Josh and I did pretty well in our seemingly endless presentations of sorting hat. (Aside: socializing with/selling your project to hundreds of strangers on one hour of sleep is awful.) Everyone was quite amused by the app ideas that the hat generated.

Awards were announced around 3pm. Josh and I won bookholders.com’s prize for the best Arduino/RPi hack. Josh took home a Teensy, and I, my first Raspberry Pi.

We got back to RPI at 8:30. It was an exhausting but rewarding weekend (as hackathons always are). It was also my most successful hackathon yet! It was my first hardware hack and first prize.