I've spent most of a sunny San Francisco weekend at a indoors Hackathon. It's been a lot of fun and I got the chance to work with some very talented software and hardware engineers. Our team included engineers which during the week work for companies such as Twilio, Google, and Salesforce tackled the challenge of mashing together a project devoted to doing societal good. We had a guy in the team from the hardware company
Electric Imp which brought a tiny connected device, that attached to water pipes can measure flow to the millimeter and we based our project on this cool little thing. The goal was to build a website and encourage households to donate money or water excess to societies in need. This was a weekend of play and we used a bunch of technology to put this together. Basically the (water) flow went like this:
- Hardware meter sends pulses for water passing through a pipe to the Electric Imp network
- This is forwarded as JSON to Firebase
- Further forwarded to Keen.io where its aggregated and queries are used to present graphs on a website
- As an alternative we used Highcharts for charts.
- A website shows monthly, daily, minute consumption of water on a webpage
The project we presented is here https://github.com/tombrew/flowbright
We won the price for most scrappy project since we used an array of APIs of to get a simple prototype working. (We even had a SMS feature to receive water stats with the Twilio API).
It was a lot of fun and I'd like to thank my team members for a creative and fun weekend.
