The wunderbar

The wunderbar comes in a package of 6 BTLE sensors of different types (temp, light sound...) and an embedded device that connects over wifi to the Open Sensor Cloud Platform. It aims to be an easy “Internet of Things” starter kit, where you don’t have to worry about the security and hardware since it has all been taken care of the relayr.io-team.

The beginning

On half past ten on friday, september 26th around 40 engineers, designers and developers gathered at the betahouse in Berlin to be welcomed by the relayr.io team for their first 24 hours hackathon around their product - the wunderbar. A brief introduction was given of what the idea behind the wunderbar is, how the communications and the hardware is setup and that the hashtag for this event would be #wunderhack. Deciding factors would be “quality of code” and “use of third party devices”. We the contestants introduced our ourselves and our ideas for projects.

The teams

Sensor driven canvas - Christophe, my colleague from wakesys.com and I are webdevelopers and wanted to augment an html5 canvas with sensor data from the wunderbar, which could be used for bargraphing, painting and gaming [webAPI]

Wundersound - Julian, Jose and Khaled pitched to use the sensors and a kinect to create sound or manipulate sound [iOS SDK]

GrannyVision - a monitoring device that tracks the health of a beloved elderly was presented by Chris, Simon and Steven [iOS SDK]

Saunopportunist - an idea I worked before on the hackday with Tracey, but together with Marcus and Falko the HERE Team refined their design and redid the software from scratch to build a sauna monitoring device and email alerts and android push notifications [webAPI]

NoNameIdea - Jan and Julian arrived without a project and turned their wunderbar color sensor into a colour caller for blind people [webAPI]

Babybico - Nabhila and Miha joined the hackathon with their baby sleep monitor app, they want to turn into a product [Android SDK]

Keybox - the keydock.co Team brought their product to research a way to integrate the wunderbar into their product to make use of NFC tags on the keys of their customers customers [Android SDK]

gestureBeacons - think of a scenario where a shopping window interface would let you swipe a beacon to rotate a mannequin to see a combination from behind and control a PHILIPS hue to see it in different colors [webAPI]

Supermap/Wunderbahn - scan your color coded station and your destination to get a charlie-plexed LED station matrix lead you the way, this idea was from Tito and Ema, who were joined by John [webAPI]

The hacking

Two hours in the contest and we created the github repository, found our libraries and tested our canvas with additional mouse events, while still waiting for a wunderbar. Turned out that so many wunderbars were present, that the “onboarding” process for the sensors failed (all SSIDs and BTLE names were the same) so every wunderbar had to be onboarded in a separate location. After 30 minutes with the wunderbar their cluster server broke down, but it was lunchtime and I was trying to burn the firmware on the Grove/Bridge module over BTLE afterwards. With no luck we had to ask the Team to do it again, the first time was for the color sensor to deactivate the onboard white LED, which was so bright that the color readings were wrong. Until half past ten the server was down, leaving everybody not able to work with the wunderbar for 9 hours. Not a good start for a contest all about the wunderbar!

But with all the hassle we still got our project to a surprisingly stable and presentable state over the following 15 hours. Post-wunderhacking the judges came in to watch each project presentation with the other contestants.

The results

Keybox realized early that the wunderbar was overkilling their product and used the time and atmosphere to brainstorm their product flow instead. Babybico actually managed to deliver an android app that also pushes data to a smart watch, when the accelerometer and microphone reached a certain value. With the third project (NoNameIdea) the jury and Jackson (co-founder) decided to kill “quality of code” as a factor to win the prize. The fourth project was the team around wundersound, that managed to work out a kinect to arduino bridge and a triggered sound interface, but the iOS SDK was declared not ready at 6 in the morning so they could not bring it together with the wunderbar. Up was our turn and I managed to sell our “flightsimulator” canvas quite well and I felt relieved. The saunopportunists presented their project where the temperature device was not fixed until 5 minutes before all presentations began and Marcus showed a lot of patience with 3 boards that didn’t work. Sadly I missed the presentations of the gestureBeacons and the wunderbahn team, but I talked to John who I knew from the hackday two weeks earlier. Wunderbahn could not work out the problems of the wunderbar and built it based on an arduino instead. The GrannyVision Team were also troubled with the missing iOS SDK but managed to upload their sensor data to the relayr cloud.

The winners

So there we were, no sleep, no shower and no clue who would win, when the jurors came back with the results; third place and winner of the quadrocopters were the gestureBeacon guys. Winner of the PS4s and second place were the wundersound guys. Their 3rd team partner left after start, only returned for his buddies in the morning and was surprised like all others when he was given a PS4 as well. The jury decided to give the 4th PS4 to the color telling sensor guys. Babybico convinced everyone with their working app, 3d printed case (they brought a printer with them), well designed graphics and their motivation for the idea! The 2000 EUR for the first prize will be probably be of some help when they start to run a business.

The balcony

The unofficial evaluation at the “smokers lounge” was, that this hackathon was not a total disaster thanks to the relayr.io-team fixing all their and our problems within the contest. For a product that is already available to buy/pre-order, it felt not ready or at least a heavy burden for their support team. But we were all happy to be there, have met awesome people and this great team, the food was tasty and the fridge filled with Club Mate. Relayr is on a good path with the wunderbar, their concept seems right and they are able to make it work the way they want. It may was a rough hackathon for them but everyone learned a lot that day and since we all were supportive and understanding, the relayr.io team decided to give out a free wunderbar for every team not taking the first, second or third place!

The links

the wunderbar - https://relayr.io/wunderbar

Eventpage - https://relayr.io/event/wunderbar-hackathon

twitter - https://twitter.com/hashtag/wunderhack

Me failing at live blogging - http://live.24liveblog.com/1268741