IoT Hackathon hosted by Traction Labs at The Vine – Irvine, CA
The Nectar UX team participated in an IoT hackathon event at The Vine in Irvine, CA. The team came with an open mind and an excited spirit and met many amazing people. We had 12 hours to come up with a mobile app or ioT technology with a practical use.
Our group members from the Nectar team included: Debbie Seo, Tyler Harris, Evan Ross. We were joined by Jack the bio-med student, Adrian the software engineer, and Levi the android developer whom we met at the event.
Our idea: To create a smart weight lifting bar called FormSense. Ultimately, the bar would tell a user when their form is incorrect without having to have a spotter or personal trainer present while preventing users from self-injury. A smart sensor device would be placed on the workout bar, which would then communicate with a mobile application that would record users work out analytics.
The technology: We started with the hardware. We rented out an Arduino starter kit and a sensor pack by SunFounder. We created a circuit that connected a tilt sensor (LED included) with a buzzer that would sound when the user wasn’t performing a perfect straight up and down press.
We then attempted to connect our Arduino to the internet via Ethernet shield and Ethernet cable. We successfully connected it to the internet and used an API called M2X by At&t, which would store our sensor data and plot our data on an analytics chart. We collected two points of data until our internet connection mysteriously stopped connecting. Meanwhile, Debbie created a beautiful UI for our product, while Evan created a website to present our work and practice our pitch. Our other teammates mounted the product to a PVC pipe to use as a weight bar to test the effectiveness and it worked!
Overall, the event was a great learning experience. We stepped away from our comfort zones and tried to understand the hardware that makes up iOT solutions. This helped us further our design capabilities AND the food was great too! Thanks, At&t and Traction Labs for hosting such an amazing event. We all had a great time.
