Winners of the Connect2.me™ Challenge and the i5 Hackathon

C2M® (Formerly Connect2.me) attended the i5 Hackathon by Tech Mahindra a few weeks ago at The University of Texas at Dallas. There were numerous innovative ideas that were introduced by UTD students. We had our platform available for students to integrate into their project ideas.

Challenges at the i5 Hackathon by Tech Mahindra

There were a few different challenges at this hackathon with one of them being the C2M® Challenge. The winners of that challenge were the meChair team. Their innovative idea derived from them experiencing back pain previously and an article by Crunchedd mentioning how sitting improperly can lead to death. That is why this group created this idea of the meChair! Some of the questions C2M asked the team were the following:

1. Why did you consider using C2M® (Formerly Connect2.me) into your project? The C2M platform is tailored for IOT needs, which was exactly what we needed.  We could get our idea implemented easily with less code, which means leading to less debugging and less time.
2.  Would you want to learn more about C2M for future integration into your projects? Absolutely
3. How did C2M help you finish your project? What connectors did you use?We used Arduino MQTT connectors
4. Would you recommend c2m to other developers? Sure
5.  Would you participate in a future hackathon? If so, Why? Yes, my team is excited about working with hardware and see something physically that works and makes sense to users. And with IOT, the applications are numerous and the impact we could do is tremendous. We are looking out for IOT hacks for our future Hackathons and make use of C2M.

With that being said the team was asked what was next for the meChair and the following was their response:

Enhancements are limitless:

•          Identify the user sitting on meChair.
•          Automatic height adjustment based on user sitting on meChair.
•          Biometric reader on handles to record attendance.
•          Effective timesheet tracking

Another challenge was the i5 Hackathon Challenge by Tech Mahindra. The winners were the CodeLab team consisting of 3 UTD students.  CodeLab is a real time collaborative code editor primarily to teach computer programming to young girls in remote areas. CodeLab lets you seamlessly code like you’re in the same room. It included features like real time rich messaging and translation between teacher and students, two-way sharing of the code editor, real-time video call and performance feedback.

The CodeLab team came up with this idea one day before the hackathon by looking into different APIs presented such as the C2M® (Formerly Connect2.me) API that could be used to make things smarter and connect to the Internet. Similarly the Kandy API could be used to add realtime communication into normal processes such as code sharing and browsing, teaching, studying and notes sharing.   The team was asked the following questions:

1.  Why did you consider using C2M at first and then decided to use another platform?We came up with the idea for the Tech Mahindra Genze about reporting accident information using the C2M® API.   We were impressed by how easily C2M® (Formerly Connect2.me) API integrated with different devices providing a lot of paramters for fault detection. However another team had already chosen a similar topic to this idea so we decided to go with another idea.
2. Would you want to learn more about C2M® for future integration into your projects?Yes, we do plan to integrate some features of C2M® (Formerly Connect2.me) API in the final launch of our application as C2M® can help our application to reach out to more people.
3. Do you believe this event helped you gain more awareness about Internet of Things? If so, how?We definitely gained more awareness, as we saw how other teams incorporate the C2M® API into their projects to connect things to the internet.
4. Would you participate in a future hackathon? If so, Why?We definitely aspire to participate and would recommend others to join in future hackathons as they are an amazing learning experience. We also look forward to C2M® to host future Internet of Things hackathons.

Overall, the hackathon was a great success for everyone that attended and participated. C2M® was glad to help students with integration of the C2M platform and continues to help developers. If you have any questions about C2M® please contact us today.