Intel's Internet of Things Hackathon

My reaction to some blinking lights.

This weekend Intel hosted a hackathon at Huge to promote the Galileo and the Edison, their line of maker-oriented modular computers. The first 100 pre-registered attendees was given an incredibly generous bag of hardware:

• 1 Intel Edison
• 1 Intel Galileo
• 1 Grove Starter Kit
• Bag of useful cables
• 8gb USB with a bunch of tutorials, documentation, and getting started guides.

In total, without any winnings or additional prizes (they were pretty liberal with the prize giving, but we didn't get lucky), we ended up walking out with around $600 worth of hardware at the end of the first day.

The people who presented to the 200ish individuals in attendance stayed throughout the hackathon working on their own projects and helping the other groups when they needed it. We got to hear from the Octoblu team about a project to consolidate APIs into one visual interface that allows users to forgo any kind of intense documentation study. I know a few teams made use of their (currently free) service in their projects. One of the more interesting ones they told us about was using their system to operate some limited capabilities on a car that Intel gave them to hack on.

I was mostly focused on getting familiar with the hardware. The documentation was unfortunately sparse on most of the components, especially for the newly added JavaScript compatibility (made possible with node.js). If you knew C or C++ you were in a better place, but for web guys like me, it was rough trying to figure out how things worked.

Intel made this weekend pretty great for everyone. Free computers. Free learning. Free food. I'm looking forward to the next large scale hackathon that comes to town. If it's anything like this one was, it'll be a great time.