The Secret Life of Makers and Hackers

The other day I met a wonderful person - Zentelechia Yura Zubarovsky (startup in the field of hardware technologies). He spent two days with engineers, hackers, designers, biologists, and marketers. He shared with me what he learned and that girls are also needed in hardware projects.

What is a hackathon?

• Hackathon is an innovative way to generate new ideas.
• Hackathon is a continuous work (in the format of 24 or 48 hours) on your idea, prototype, project business plan and final presentation to experts.
• Hackathon is a platform that brings together specialists from various technical, economic, creative and managerial areas.
• Hackathon is a new way to engage and create a community of makers and startup culture.
• Hackathon is an alternative to lectures, summaries, series, and idle weekends.
• Hackathon is a tech-fitness, technical and entrepreneurial brain pumping.

How does this all happen?

It all starts with the fact that you register for any hackathon - AngelHack , Hack for People {Hardware} , HackDay and others. I participated in one of them.

The first day is networking. After the presentation of the projects, people who came alone and without ideas began to disperse among the teams. Many came up to me, were interested and thought about joining, and in the end I got Vadim, who was engaged in sales and was well versed in marketing - just what you need for a hackathon. After all, it’s not enough just to assemble the device, it still needs to be properly “packaged” from the point of view of the target audience and presented to the jury at the end.

We shared responsibilities: I am making a prototype, Vadim is responsible for the target audience and the formation of the presentation. He interviews the girls present, identifying the requirements for the bracelet and identifying the purchase model, as well as immersing them in the ideology of the product itself. It was important for us that the maximum number of participants and jury members imbued with the idea of ​​a bracelet over the next two days. Vadim coped with this task perfectly.

The team needs to share responsibilities. Artists, designers, engineers, programmers, marketers. Everyone does what he can. But still, we work as one.

When creating the prototype, the following provisions were adopted:

• The prototype must be in the form of a bracelet.
• At the presentation, it should work autonomously, without power wires
• The prototype should be as compact as possible.
• Transmitted sensation - lightly sliding a finger across the surface of the skin
• The amplitude and speed of the transmitted sensation - should be identical to the sliding of the finger on the touch surface
• The touch surface should be the plastic surface of the housing itself.

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From the point of view of technical implementation, at that time the prototype was as follows:

• Arduino Pro Mini
• Bluetooth module HC-04
• Small server (found the smallest available at that time, weighing 1.7g)
• The touch surface made of two aluminum petals and the CapSense library, which allows you to estimate the percentage of overlap of the petal with your finger, by measuring the capacitance of the capacitor formed by the “petal-finger” system and thereby determine the position of the surface touch point.
• Meals were expected from two lithium tablets cr2032

An idea is one thing. The completely different is the prototype. There is already a Bluetooth module, and lithium tablets, and a smartphone, and a server, soldering and 3-D printers.

The Bluetooth module communicates with a smartphone, which in turn is connected via a server to the smartphone of the owner of the second bracelet. The program for the smartphone was supposed to be concocted initially on Tasker + Python (SL4A) (there is an example of a bluetooth chat that could be used almost completely), but during the hackathon one of the participants showed APP INVENTOR (for those who are not yet aware, this is visual a tool from MIT that quickly and easily allows you to create full-fledged Android programs - appinventor.mit.edu )

The back-end was originally supposed to be done on Meteor-e (yes, of course it’s a perversion, but its reactivity always bribed me), but in the end I had to abandon the back-end and focus on the prototype and the program for the smartphone. I made a simple program with which you could connect via bluetooth to a bracelet, and moving your finger on the screen with your finger on the screen - move the servo.

Here you immediately forget the words "I can not", "I can not." You are given 48 hours. You take and do: google, look for a team, dig into smart books or a geek magazine But in the end, you do it anyway.

Before, I almost never soldered. All ideas were tested on prototyping boards, twists and finished components. But then I had to. Firstly, everything had to be squeezed into a small volume so that the prototype did not look really monstrous, so I had to cut all the connectors and solder (a month later I mastered LUT and started experimenting with flexible printed circuit boards based on polyimide).



I wanted to initially design and print the case of the bracelet on a 3D printer, but in the process I realized that I just didn’t have enough time (for a start, I had to finish assembling the electronics in order to get the final internal dimensions of the bracelet case and simulate the elegant outline of the case). And the queue for 3D printers was huge (although there were 3 of them - the teams did not lose time and worked on iteration after iteration of new versions of cases, parts and components of their devices). At some point, Damir (one of the hackathon members who is professionally involved in the creation of robots) said: “Why are you suffering, use polymorphus”. We went to Chip and Deep, bought polymorphus and Damir helped to pile the case. Super material - warmed up in water, kneaded, blinded what you need and after cooling got a durable and pleasant to the touch plastic. It looked of course

I took the strap already ready - someone trained in 3D printing and he came up to us. The strap has become the most beautiful part of the prototype. And the most short-lived - he constantly wanted to fumble in his hands and he quickly cracked and fell apart.

In 48 hours, you need to develop a business strategy, find competitors, analyze the market, Central Asia, and prepare for the pitch.

Vadim, at this time, was studying competitors - he was looking for and analyzing similar projects. They immediately found three bracelets that very closely reflected our concept, but had, as it seemed to us, one significant difference. Tactilu.com, Taptap.me and bond-touch.com All announced about 2 years ago. There were fundraising campaigns on kickstarter, quite successful, but then there was some silence - no press releases, no news, no mentions on the Internet. I immediately wrote the founders of two draft letters, asking about the state and reasons for the lull. But I didn’t receive an answer.

The time was approaching the presentation. Vadim strenuously pumped himself up with some perky music before the performance. Teams excitedly finished off their offspring. Suddenly, a problem with the prototype appeared - the reed relay stopped working (I did not understand what happened to it), which connected the power to the server when it was supposed to move. And since the servo even without movement consumes the holding current and is significant enough for lithium batteries, very soon the prototype began to die immediately after turning on the power. Fresh batteries were drained instantly. By the beginning of our presentation, the prototype was not functioning. I just held the bracelet in my hands, and Vadim told the jury a story.



The hackathon did his job - I lit up the idea, met a bunch of interesting people and outlined a vector for the further development of the project. After a week, I met with the creator of the Taptap.me bracelet. The other day, they will start selling - the product was amazing - now I understand what level I need to set myself. Everything is yet to come.

Girls engineers, designers, programmers, marketers can and should come to the Hackathon - it all depends on your competencies. Hardware projects are cool!