Work Hackathon: 30th June

At work I recently helped organise a Hackathon for the Manchester IBM Lab. I wanted to take some time and do a retrospective of the projects that my team worked on. Our team consisted of Toby Fleming, Manuel Cantu Reinhard and myself. We ended up doing two projects, one which was more of an electronics project and the other which was a software development project. 

GDI (Graphical DNS/DHCP Interface)

Our team created a web application to allow IBMers to add hardware to the lab infrastructure with DNS/DHCP configuration. Prior to the Hackathon a lot of preliminary work was put in to create a git repo, with a Vagrant/VirtualBox VM and Ansible provisioning to setup the development environment. This allowed our team to get straight to work on the application which would have been unachievable without this preliminary setup. The application itself was a Flask Python application. The front end had Flat UI/Bootstrap CSS with some LESS alterations to adjust the look and feel. We also used Javascript to allow some dynamic content addition to the forms.

This project isn't quite as exciting from a visual point of view as our second project, so I will just get on to talking about that.

DaaS (Doughnuts-as-a-Service)

We have a doughnut rota at our office that means every Friday whoever is down for that week has to go and buy some Krispy-Kreme doughnuts for the lab. The steps to do this are:

1. Go and buy the Doughnuts.
2. Bring the Doughnuts to the kitchen.
3. Send out an e-mail to let everyone know that they have arrived.

We thought we could do better than this so we came up with DaaS!

We first came up with the idea that when any sugary treat is delivered to the kitchen there should be a way to instantly let everyone know that they have arrived. Nobody wants to be waiting an extra ten minutes for someone to get to their desk and compose an e-mail to be informed of doughnut arrival.

Getting Started....

We set off to work hooking up the raspberry pi with the flick switch and "Big red button" that we had ordered. At various points through the day we stopped to discuss design decisions and any problems with a whiteboard session.

state machine, sql statements and generator expressions

Toby and Manuel hard at work

After hooking up the electronics and doing some simple tests we started working on the implementation. We used a simple python GPIO library for interfacing with the flick switch and button.

The Final Product

So here is what it looks like fully working with the switch activated(obviously the Pi goes inside the box). I'm actually really proud of this as it was a pretty cool project to work on.

Thanks.