Wow, it has been a while. Since I last posted I have started college at Carnegie Mellon University. There have been lots of awesome clubs and activities and classes that have been going on since I started, but today I wanted to talk about Hack CMU.
Hack CMU is CMU's internal hackathon. If you have never heard of a hackathon, today is your
lucky day! Hackathons are events where teams work on a project (usually tech based) for 24-48 hours straight. They are crazy and awesome and sleep deprived. Hack CMU is a 24 hour beginner friendly hackathon put on every year by ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery). One of the great parts about Hack CMU is the fact that upperclassmen, grad students, and reps from tech companies are available to help mentor teams. This was very helpful for our team, because we needed a lot of help at times.
 |
| Front of the Mailbox |
For this year's Hack CMU, I was on a team with 3 other freshmen (in total we had 3 CS majors and a physics major). Our project was SnailEMail, an automatic email notification for snail mail sent to our university mailboxes. At the end of the 24 hours, we had a working prototype and a website that could in theory accept subscriptions to our service. I got to work mainly on the back end side of things, getting the email notifications to work. To sense the mail being placed in the mailbox, we used a PIR sensor (as well as a micro switch to determine if the door was open). These sensors then connected to a raspberry pi which interpreted the sensor input and sent emails to the owner of our "mailbox" (aka a very hacked together cardboard box).
 |
| Back of the Maibox |
The hackathon was super fun. It was really fun going from idea to real thing in 24 hours (with lots of help from our mentors). Plus, we also won Google's prize (each of 5 companies chose a winner), which was a very pleasant surprise.
Hopefully, I get the chance to go to more hackathon's in the future. Also, I will hopefully have more to post here before another 2 months goes by....
