Purdue BoilerMake 2014

I partook in this years BoilerMake Hackathon here at Purdue. The hackathon runs from October 17 to the 19th. This was my first hackathon and will surly be the first of many for me. I had a great time.

I had had little plans for the hackathon, I was going to attempt to move BoilerBazaar over to the MEAN stack but never got to it because of lack of stable wifi. So I went in with an open mind and little plans. This was liberating at a time when college has turned into SSDD of worrying and homework.

The first thing that really grabbed my attention was the badges. They were Arduino!

[Image of badge]

The badges were modeled after the Leonardo. Which is great because I was shafted one from Microsoft when they had their Internet of Things promotion for the free board but never sent me mine :(

With my new found Arduino badge I got straight to work reading the QR code off of the back. But try as I might it would not scan! I'm not sure if this was on purpose as a puzzle or not but I had to take a picture of the QR code, open it in Photoshop, invert the colors and use the "Curves" menu to allow me to scan it.

The QR code took me here, a GitHub page with information about how to use the badge. I believe I was the first person to actually get to the GitHub page and have my badge set up and sending commands. The badges have the ability to take to the other badges via a radio on the board.

Commands

#sends message to badge
send [addr] -m [message]  
send 0252 -m This is my message

#sends an led patter to badge
send [addr] -l [0-4]  
send 0252 -l 3

#pings a badge
send [addr] -p  
send 0252 -p