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When you work within a distributed team like the ones we have here at Blues Wireless, it’s important to get together in-person every once in a while (primarily to continue some heated shuffleboard rivalries!).

blues devrel team playing shuffleboard

But also to fail miserably at word-find team-building activities:

team building

Recently the Developer Experience and Cloud Services teams of Blues Wireless met up in Boston to recap, review, and set the stage for 2023. We also hosted a one-day internal hackathon to see what sorts of connected projects we could build in a single day.

While it’s one thing to hear the joys and pains that customers tell us about, it’s another thing to experience those joys and pains yourself – especially in a time-constrained hackathon setting!

hackathon developers

The Hackathon Projects

Teams of 2-4 built nine amazing projects using the Swan MCU, Notecard, and Notecarrier in creative ways (with a surprising number using Edge Impulse to integrate Machine Learning capabilities).

And those projects?

  1. 🫣 A Machine Learning-based fall detection and alerting system (inspired by this Hackster project).

  2. 🐝 A bee hive temperature and humidity monitoring/reporting system.

  3. 🕷 A “jump-scare” spider, using a gesture recognition ML model to trigger the spider:

 

  1. 🪞 “Portals” that send low-res images to each other over cellular (alas without GLaDOS).

  2. 🚶‍♀️ A Machine Learning-based person counter for walkways and trails.

  3. 🔪 The world’s slowest guillotine (also using a gesture recognition ML model):

 

  1. 🏥 A system to track patients who may walk off unbeknownst to their care providers.

  2. 🐦 A project that can detect woodpeckers before they start damaging your house.

  3. 😁 A high-powered ML-based face detection system powered by the Jetson Nano.

These projects also inspired another “jump-scare” skeleton tutorial on Hackster. Just in time to scare your neighborhood kids on Halloween! 👻

Look like fun? Blues Wireless is growing and hiring!

Happy Hack-o-ween! 🎃

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