The first Pachube International Internet of Things Hackathon is officially over! And what a weekend it was... Involving about 150 people in cities around the world, the Hackathon was our first concrete opportunity to work directly with developers who are actually making the 'things' in the Internet of Things.
We used the event as an opportunity to speed up development of our app-hosting platform and pushed out an early beta release just in time for kick-off. We even managed to distribute some specially printed stickers!
At the main event in London there was an incredible variety of contributions. From Mark Wharton and his crew from Arkessa, working with GSM-connected routers and modems that provided direct connections to Pachube for a range of Arduino-based projects; to a web-connected golden kitty; to a Rogue Commuter with an umbrella; the creative unfolding of projects was a delight to watch.
My favourite project of the Hackathon was hands-down Marvin the Paranoid Laptop, by Sarah Mount, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Wolverhampton. The project involved using Pachube to monitor a range of internal variables from a laptop (temperature, load, capacity, threads, etc) and sharing this data with a couple of existing web APIs with a bit of programming magic to create a 'personality' from this idiosyncratic data, and a way to interact with the laptop. What was so inspiring about this initiative was that it wasn't about the data, it wasn't about the hardware, it was about the human interaction. For me, that's what the Internet of Things is all about. Behind every successfully connected thing lies a 'puny' human...
It was of course great finally to see Ken Boak's nanode in action; to watch Paul Tanner, having battled through to success with our socket server, having a go at getting the first app, Averager, into the new beta app repository -- and for that we've awarded him in-absentia a bottle of wine (Paul, it's here waiting for you!); and to see Adrian McEwan's Bubblino in action (responding here to the twitter tag '#pachubehack'!). Here's more from @rainycat.
Meanwhile, there was plenty of activity going on in other parts of the world, though truth be told, we weren't great at coordinating it all. We must fix this in the next Hackathon - find better ways to keep in contact. We met in IRC, occasionally in Skype, and via the London uStream video feed. But it was hard to get a real handle on what everyone was working on.
We probably kept best contact, through continual skype sessions, with the New York City Hackathon, hosted at Natalie Jeremijenko's Environmental Health Clinic, where our-man-in-NYC, Ed Borden had his first taste of an all-night hackathon. At about 1am London time, I gave a quick but bleary-eyed intro to Pachube to the crowd at FutureLabCamp.
In Zurich Thomas Amberg and kiilo were keeping up the pace at the MechArtLab, working with cress, worms and heartbeats!
Lancaster University hosted a Hackathon where people had the wonderful idea (and weather!) to stay outdoors for much of the event! Working with the orchard, their work focused on tree sensors and cycles.
Eindhoven MAD Emergent Art Center saw 30 people (and 10 die-hards!) working through the night on Processing, Techno Jewels, Arduino and Kinect hacking.
Looks like they were working with plants at Linz's Times Up Lab.
All in all we felt the First Pachube International Internet of Things Hackathon was a great success, and we're really pleased with the range of work to have come out of the all-too-brief 24 hours. There are lots of things I think we can improve next time including better inter-city coordination, publishing, etc; perhaps more specific themes, involving non-IoT communities/groups; better timing, but as first tries go, I think we all did pretty well! Here's to the Second one happening very soon!
Thanks to everyone in all the different parts of the world, including those individuals in Japan and other cities who just popped into skype/IRC/ustream!
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