ECE instrumental in putting on HackIllinois

Nerf battles, Oculus Rifts, personalized sno-cones, therapy dogs, an ill-tempered yeti, and more were just some of the features offered to attendees at Illinois’ annual student hackathon, HackIllinois, from Friday, Feb. 27, through Sunday, March 1. 

 

Students from universities all over the country, from Georgia Tech to Carnegie Mellon, came to HackIllinois for three days of intense coding, design, and building. Forty-two ECE ILLINOIS majors joined them to create hardware and software hacks. HackIllinois hosted many of the weekend’s events in the ECE Building.

 

Joining the student hacking teams were representatives from several big-name companies, from Google to Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox, and more. These representatives were there to work with student teams and functioned as mentors, staying up nights to help teams with debugging code, integrating software packages, and troubleshooting hardware.

 

Their presence was doubly beneficial, said junior Shawn Ahn, as they helped student teams break through roadblocks, and recruited the best hackers for interviews. 

 

“My friend Alex, who worked on a team with me at HackIllinois, actually got a call from the recruiter after HackIllinois,” Ahn said. “They just said they liked working with him over the weekend, and had him come down for an interview the day after.” 

 

ECE majors at HackIllinois worked on a variety of projects. Ahn was on a team called HeartBit with computer engineering juniors Vinu Ilangovan, Alex Choi, and Michael Yoo.

 

The team took a FitBit, a popular fitness wristband, and crafted a heart-monitoring app from the software package it offered developers. Their hack allows users wearing their modified FitBit wristband to constantly monitor their heart rates. Any time this rate fell or rose in a drastic amount, the FitBit could alert a physician, who could then examine the heartbeat data with past patient heart activity, and call an ambulance. 

 

Ahn mentioned that his team formed and tossed around ideas for their project before the hackathon started. But a few hours into their work, they realized the developer API did not allow them access to FitBit’s real-time heart data. 

 

“The FitBit tracks heart rate data automatically, which is why we bought it beforehand,” Ahn said. “But around 1 or 2 a.m. Friday, we found out that the API wouldn’t let us grab that data.” 

 

Ahn’s team thought they’d run into a dead end. Ilangovan and Choi tapped furiously at the FitBit app; they could see the heart rate data updating in real-time, but couldn’t manually extract the live feed to include in their project. Ilangovan and Choi then realized that if they could see it on the screen, it could be captured as an image. 

 

“We decided to go with this crazy idea of capturing the screen displaying the heart rate app every 10 seconds and building an image recognition algorithm to analyze the heart rate manually,” Ahn said. “We had no idea if it would work, but we only had two days, so we figured we might as well give it a shot. It ended up working even better than we expected.” 

 

After furiously coding for hours on end and sleeping barely six hours the entire weekend, Ahn and his team members had finished their project.

 

Though Ahn believes having more time would have allowed his team to make it more aesthetically pleasing, HeartBit ended up winning prizes from IBM and IMO. Ahn walked away from HackIllinois with a bunch of awarded gear, including gaming mice and portable phone chargers.

 

“The best part was just the size of Illinois and the hackathon it was able to put on,” Ahn said. “It was only the second year, but the committee did such a great job organizing it.” 

 

Across the hall, electrical engineering senior Dario Aranguiz was having “an incredible time.” designing a hydration app with fellow electrical engineering and computer engineering seniors Brady Salz and Ahmed Suhyl, and electrical engineering graduate student Kashev Dalmia.

 

“Building our project actually went really, really smoothly. We were shocked at how well things went together, to be honest,” Aranguiz said. “We completed the hack with about six hours to spare, and we only had two major hiccups. The first was trying to decide which database to use, which took about four to six hours, and the other was me accidentally deleting all the code. That took a solid two hours to fix.”

 

Aranguiz treated HackIllinois as an investment both of time and effort, not just in terms of investing work to earn a prize, but also as a way to take out a weekend and focus intently on developing a new skill.

 

“Hackathons are a great time to shore up a particular skill you've always wanted to work on,” Aranguiz said. “In my case, I've been wanting to get better at Android development, but I haven't had any opportunities to just sit down and Android for a while. Well, all I did was develop for Android for 36 hours at the hackathon, and now I'm way more proficient than I was two weeks ago.”

 

Aranguiz’s team ended up winning Best use of the Spark Core for their project. However, the event was its own reward, as well, he said.

 

“Being in a bullpen of people, all with novel ideas and all working as hard as they can to push out their product in 36 hours, there's really no better motivator,” Aranguiz said. “The organizers did an excellent job with the event. Plenty of food, plenty of Red Bull, plenty of support for when your hack wasn't going as well as it should, the list goes on. I can't congratulate them enough.” 

 

Perhaps the most easily identifiable difference between last year’s HackIllinois and this year’s was the inclusion of the ECE Building.

 

Using the building allowed HackIllinois to split up its 1,300 attendees between Siebel Center and ECE.

 

The ECE Building hosted about 450 students, and provided them with several rooms for working on projects and soldering labs for hardware hacks, said HackIllinois co-director and computer science sophomore Nick Kortendick.

 

"It let us showcase our awesome campus to students not attending Illinois," Kortendick said.