HackGSU Fall 2018

OVERVIEW

This event was a 36 hour hackathon that took place in Atlanta, Georgia on Georgia State University’s campus in the fall of 2018. my team competed for quite a few of the challenges including State Farm’s “Here to help life go right“ Challenge.

LIMITATIONS

We had roughly 36 hours to dream up a design, execute on that plan, then present to judges at the end of the weekend. A lot of the challenges we faced were from learning new web development tools and figuring out how to send data around.

 GAME PLAN

            So, my team looked at the list of sponsors, hardware, and other prizes at this hackathon and were immediately interested in making an iOS app. The other main web developers on the team had never done anything like that and wanted to try something new, and, seeing as how I’m not really into the web development side of things, I was all for it. So we settled on making an app/system that would alert loved ones and emergency response teams to your GPS location in the event of an automobile accident.

What did I do for this hack you ask? Well, I’ll tell you! My big part was the IoT board (DragonBoard 410c) we used to gather real-time GPS coordinates to push to the map. I also integrated a vibration sensor into the board to simulate the event of a crash. It triggered a buzzer to go off and lights to flash, as well as the actual pushing of latitude and longitude to the web server. I had significant trouble getting the board to actually work in the first place as it continually seemed to break the OS whenever I powered off the machine. I finally got a working version in the end, but that was a major hassle.

So let’s talk about the website. Firstly, I have to give mad props to our main designer of that website, he did a fantastic job with how it looks, the smoothness to it all, and just overall feel. I didn’t touch any of it, but it came out looking amazing. The back-end guys did some pretty amazing work as well. I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but from what I understand, they had me push my lat lon data to a web server where both the app and the website were pulling from constantly. This made data acquisition for them a lot cleaner and easier. All I had to do was push a file to an ip address, and I was off to the races.

Lastly, the app! We also added a companion app to this project that was setup to send your latitude and longitude to a pre-defined number. You can also call them immediately if you need assistance. The app also has a link directly to the website, so that you can see the map of where the crash occurred right away.

           The team came together and made a fantastic project that won us two challenges! Link to the Submission!

NEWS:

MLG Twitter – https://twitter.com/MLHacks/status/1048969178638684161