It was a hackathon of a different kind. Students of the University of Minnesota, USA, designers and engineers belonging to Logic PD, a product development and launch acceleration company, recently created Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for the real world in a marathon, 24 hours development session.
Logic PD said nine teams including its designers, engineers and the University students developed products to “address real world challenges and uncovered new insights on how IoT technology can help improve people’s lives”, as part of the Logic PD Acme-thon, held on April 23 and 24. The teams used publicly available datasets and application programming interfaces (APIs), and tools such as the SeeControl IoT Cloud platform, the Intel Galileo Arduino development board, and even 3D printing.
The teams’ efforts were later evaluated by a team of judges. They selected three teams as winners. First place went to the ‘Toothacks’, the runner-up were ‘Distributed Bike Share’, while the third prize went to ‘One Ring Buffer to Rule Them All’. ‘The LabViewers’ won the Fan Favorite chosen by all attendees.
“The Acme-thon demonstrated just how much can be accomplished in 24 hours with a small team of multi-disciplinary experts,” said Scott Nelson, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice-president of Logic PD. “These teams proved that real world applications can be developed and demonstrated using tools and process that dramatically shorten the concept-to-market cycle. All of the solutions developed have the potential to be further refined and made market ready in a short period of time.”
Toothhacks team members were Logic PD designers and engineers, Brian Clemens, Dan Slotman, Mark Herscher and Joe Schneider. They created the Impact Brush, an electric tooth brush that can track metrics including the length of time spent brushing, the angles used and how often one uses the tooth brush. The latter can collect the data in the Cloud and sends reports with helpful tips to improve usage, an ideal application for parents teaching youngsters good oral health habits.
The second spot went to the University of Minnesota two-man team of Jim Crist and Ryan Madson who developed a solution for bike sharing. Their solution combined the tracking and locking system with a Cloud-based asset management application to create an infrastructure-free sharing platform. Distributed Bike Share allows riders to use their smartphones to do an Online search for the bike nearest their location, reserve it, pick it up and ride it to another destination without having to return it to a predetermined location.
‘One Ring Buffer to Rule Them All’ team created a multi-modal security platform for card purchases using NFC (near field communication) authentication combined with camera imaging. Logic PD team members, Kevin Holland, Luke Buer, Matt Hilden and Erik Johnson developed a card swiping system that can photograph users at the point of sale and send the images along with the card data to the Cloud, from where it can be linked to the cardholder’s accounts showing not only what was purchased and the price but also a photograph of the purchaser.
Image Credit: Logic PD
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