HackBurst 2016-17 Winners

Three teams hacked their way to victory at HackBurst 2016-17, a highly contested internal Hackathon hosted by QBurst for its coders in Trivandrum. They won the top spot overthrowing 21 teams. The dusk-to-dawn coding challenge was held on January 13, 2017.

The HackBurst Challenge

The hackers had to build a prototype of an application blending any of these concepts:

• Internet of Things
• Automation
• Networking
• Games
• Social Media
• Travel

Innovation, code quality, presentation, and completeness were the judging criteria.

Our coders are up to the challenge. Scenes from HackBurst 2016-17.

The Hacker Response

The coders rose to the challenge, unleashing fresh ideas and taming them with their slick coding skills in the true spirit of hackers. The diversity in ideas and implementation did not fail to impress the judges, who had their job cut out for them. The entries that finally made it addressed clear problem statements and satisfied the hackathon criteria.

1. Smart Presentation Box

Finding it hard to be physically present at every meeting? Turn your room into a telepresence studio and join the conversation from anywhere in the world. Team Skier’s Smart Presentation Box is a solution meant for just that. Built on Raspberry Pi and Android Things, Smart Presentation Box allows you to access presentations on all paired devices, make real-time annotations, and transform meetings into meaningful collaborations.

2. Smart City Guide

Who doesn’t feel lost in a new city? Where to stay, park, eat? Even with all the apps at your disposal, figuring out these simple details can be vexing. In a smart city, how do you address these challenges? The quest for the perfect solution led 3E Team to devise a futuristic app that is smart enough to know what you need and guide you through a maze of options. The solution draws on cutting-edge technologies including the industry hot Xamarin and Azure Machine Learning.

3. Parking Lot Locator

Driving around in circles looking for a vacant lot can drive anyone crazy. Team Dry Coders have of course had their fair share of this, which is why they zeroed in on this challenge. The team devised the Public Parking Lot Finder, an IoT- enabled device that sends live status updates of available slots to drivers so they don’t have to second-guess their parking options or get lost in the tangle. Talk of making your city smart, here and now!

Hacker Quotes

“Creating a prototype within 12 hours was a tough challenge,” admits Sreeraj S of Dry Coders. The team accomplished it by ably dividing the tasks. “Ours was an attempt to make something new and learn something new,” says Jithin J R of his team’s Smart Presentation Box. Kannan Karthikeyan of 3E Team feels they clicked as a team. According to him, teamwork was as crucial a component as the idea or technologies they chose.