Hackathon Projects
Each October the members of the AK Dev Alliance teams up with local businesses and community organizations to hack on projects that they find valuable. Check out a few past projects below!
Everyone probably encounters countless automatic door access control systems and accessible pushbuttons for entry and exit to buildings throughout our day, but what if it wasn’t just a matter of convenience. Imagine being unable to open and close doors in your home without the assistance of another person. While retrofitting or building a home with accessibility in mind is becoming more and more commonplace, a universal device that could be placed on any door and controlled by either proximity, remote control, or voice automation is unavailable.
The cost of the hardware to install automatic swing door openers in a home or workplace to allow a wheelchair or walker users to independently open and close interior doors is astronomical ranging between $700 to $4,000 per door. Designing a device or method that could make any interior door convenient and safe for easy access is one of the top requests from people that struggle to live independently. Inventing a door opener system that can be customized with a wide range of activation devices, such as wheelchair-control switches, wall push-pads, X-10 home control systems, and other control systems to suit each person’s specific needs and abilities would be a key feature.
BeadedStream needs to manufacture cables with multiple sensors as fast as possible. The identifier for each sensor is coded in the sensor when you talk to it. To reduce cable build time, they don’t hook up each sensor and check it’s identifier and write it down. They wanted an automated way to gather the sensor identifiers (in order) so they could burn that into the EEPROM and provide that information to the purchaser for their use after installation.
Instead of solving everything, the team targeted how to detect the sensors in order. This solves only half the problem but it was a big part.
The devices connect to a device that services a webpage. This device “polls” any attached cable, reading its list of sensors and values they return. Jeremy Swartwood wrote C# code to get the output from the webpage, parse it into my program, and then detect which sensor was different in temperature than the others. It then writes that value to a file and considers that sensor “recorded”. Once it finds the next sensor that moves above by the threshold, it checks that off and writes that sensor ID to the file (in order).
Once done a file is created that could be used to write to the EEPROM for the cable.
See no evil wearable tech
A Bonus Student Project