OHI/O 2016 Hackathon Recap

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After the frantic staccato of keyboards stopped, and the din of hundreds of engineering students debating code at once subsided, the 2016 OHI/O Hackathon drew to a close and the winners were announced.

Since its launch in 2013, The Ohio State University event has grown from about 100 participants to more than 750 this year.

From Saturday Nov. 12 to Sunday Nov. 13 students had 24 hours to complete a multitude of team engineering projects.

This year, three students from the Ohio State Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering program were named among the winners. 

1. Shreyas Muralidharan from Team: Quantum Tunnelers, Top 10

2. Chad Holl and Collin Stipe from Team: Project Lit, Top 10

3. Ian Hansborough from Team: Hatchli won "Most Ambitious Hack"

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Muralidharan said his partners created a drone to surpass the constraints of current technology, such as limited range, cost and accessibility. 

And now, for the specifics...

"Our drone solves many of these problems by establishing a connection through the 3G/4G LTE network. The drone essentially communicates from a standard Linux/Windows machine through an XBOX controller. This is achieved through a piece of C/C++ code that decodes USB XBOX controller input. We then convert this to a packet of 4 bytes. We can control two degrees of freedom with our setup: the pitch and yaw. We can also control the throttle," he said. "That being said, we sent 4 bytes, one for each of the three aforementioned attributes. Finally, we have a trim functionality with the last byte. This is achieved by sending the bytes to a cloud server through Amazon Web Services. The server 'listens' for incoming communication, and pipes it to a different port transmitting the signal. A raspberry pi on the drone then requests information from the server. This is done because we cannot send information directly to a device on the 3G network. This was the most difficult part of the project, and was the majority of the project. We successfully demonstrated full control of the drone with this method. Servo motors were controlled through pulse width modulation with input from the XBOX controller."

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Meanwhile, Holl said, his team developed an app to demonstrate control and oversight of lights and various appliances found in homes. The app provides a layout of a home with the ability to zoom into each room in order to monitor and control the devices within. Lights can then be turned on and off, or temperature adjusted through the app in real time.

Aside from the energy-saving capabilities of the app, he said, their work also allows homeowners to set security alarms and monitor homes with motion detection at the front door.

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"A Raspberry Pi coded via Python was used to control the hardware, which consisted of lighting, motion detector, thermometer, and cooling. The Pi would communicate with the app, and vice versa, allowing for bidirectional information throughput. This enabled real time monitoring and control over each piece of hardware," Holl said. 

Both ECE students said their time at the Hackathon this year took their work in the classroom to a whole new level.

"I had a great experience with the Hackathon, as I learned a great deal of networking information. We worked a lot with bit shifting and byte manipulation, which I had to pick up on the spot," Muralidhuran said. "My role was involved in both the hardware and pulse width modulation of the servo motors, as well as the networking methods that we used.  The Hackathon was a great experience that allows for almost full creativity and any ideas to be developed. It was a truly fun experience."

Find a recap story from the Columbus Dispatch here:

http://go.osu.edu/hack-d