I'm planning to participate at a 48 hour hackathon. This is my first hackathon and I'm searching for some ideas. The hackathon has no theme, all ideas are allowed, but I'm more oriented towards microcontroller embedded applications with the possibility to team up with a mobile app and/or web app guy. I have decent knowledge of C, Python, Linux, electronics, signal processing, working with all kinds of sensors/actuators. I'm also passionate about FPGAs, computer security and game development.

The organizers will provide only basic hardware like measurement equipment and dev boards like Arduino and RasPi, anything else we need we must bring it ourselves, but I'm fine with that.

Any hints, advice or ideas for my first hackathon project will be welcome.

 

Well I'd love to have more telemetry and sensing devices to work with "Health" apps on the new iPhone. A lot of people were hopeful there might be more such things in the new Apple watch, but so far not so much. Things like CO2 in your breath (capnometry), blood oxygen and blood sugar, whatever else.

More broadly, I love the the model of "stupid" or cheap sensors plus the supercomputer everyone already has in their pocket in their smartphone. I grew up in the old world where all electronics, such as lab equipment, had self contained computing and human interfaces. These were usually awful and of course were inconsistent from one device to another. I envision a new world where electronics have inside themselves only the smarts needed to perform their functions, but all interface and programming is done in software for a detached controller - a smartphone. Then the capabilities and interface can advance rapidly, independently of the device.

 

Focusing on an application for a smartphone which interfaces with all kinds of sensors could be the way to go - for medical, entertainment or education purposes.

The muscle sensors are very interesting:
http://www.advancertechnologies.com/2013/04/tutorial-bionic-iron-man-armor.html

Another interesting topic regarding interfacing with the smartphone:
http://www.mouser.com/new/NXP-Semic...lease-PR-_-Mouser-_-NXPQuickJack-_-2014-07-30

Keep the ideas coming