Galileo Hackathon at Farset Labs

Last October, Intel Belfast started talking to amazing group of people down at Farset Labs about the possibility of becoming corporate members. Fast forward to the 4th of April, 2014 and the Galileo Hackathon kicked off with a box full of Galileo’s and another full of components.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect to happen in the hacker space, but there was a tangible buzz in the room right from the kick off with folks coming down from Magee University as well as various points in Belfast. There was a great mix of teams who had come with projects in mind, and others who were happy to hack ideas together to see if they could get something working together within the time frame.

Early on, one of the project teams ran into a problem when their LCD shield stopped working. If you’ve looked at the picture to the left here, you probably figured out what the problem was, but if not, the metal housing of the Galileo’s Ethernet port was shorting out the the LCD shield. Cardboard FTW!

Left to their own devices, the progress made overnight was pretty outstanding when you consider that the teams had only gotten their hands on the kit the evening before so it was pretty exciting to finally get to see them and judge their progress.

5 projects were there at the end, ranging from twitter bots running within the Galileo, Galileo controlled cloaks, to a game controller driving a game and finally an automated drinks dispenser with 3 being able to run actual demonstrations.

All participants were given a Galileo to take home and work further with, but more importantly, as one of the judges had said, all the teams who took part should recognize that they were possibly some of the first people in the world to actively hack and work on the board and there was great scope for them to make a name for themselves by adding back to the Galileo community with their findings.

I certainly found the event to be inspiring on a number of fronts and have to doff the cap at the Andrews, Dylans, Daves and Bens of this world who make this a destination for hackers and makers in not only Belfast and NI but for the whole of the wider community.

BTW, the good photo in this article came from John Rice but I’ll leave you to guess which one that is :)