Hacks from PennApps, largest student-run hackathon | Hacker News Reader

Hacks from PennApps, largest student-run hackathon

blog.filepicker.io

23 pointsananddass15 comments

PennApps was awesome this year! I had never done a Hackathon before and now I want to do another one ASAP.

I definitely saw some amazing hacks that didn't get prizes. Someone made a robotic bartender using Arduino that had an iPad app that would let you choose drinks. It could mix from 16 ingredients and accept payments from Venmo. The best part is that team didn't bring the hardware to the event (minus the Uno board), they spent 24 of the 48 hours scrambling around Philly buying things (they're from Michigan). That's true hacking spirit.

I made PokeBattle, it's just a silly little hack but if you're interested check it out at http://pokebattle.herokuapp.com (I'm not even sure if there are directions for use or what it is, we were rushed for the demo).

I was a hacker there. I actually think some of the coolest projects went totally unnoticed. My personal favorite was http://www.bbcat.co/, which some Rutgers people made. There were also some pretty sweet hardware ones out there. Some guys used electrodes attached to a person to play that google doodle running game.

I really thought the ones that won were pretty sensationalist and not particularly complex.

(they also needed to feed us better. Some dark rooms would have been nice too...)

Yeah, I agree. More food and fewer nerf guns and the budget will balance again

Ha I loved bbcat! 21st century tomagachi. That was another one of the really polished designs that stood out - couldn't remember the name

"The internet is facing a serious problem. It doesn't have enough cats"

Love those guys :) Shout out to Devon and co @ BBCat!

I, too, was a hacker there. PennApps this year was definitely a great time, but the judging didn't really align well with the quality of apps. One of the most popular apps, PayTango, had a completely faked demo from what I saw (I saw the play button show up when they tapped a button on the iPad, revealing that it was just an image slideshow of mockups). That and the demo time was severely truncated, 75 seconds is enough to demo about one feature, and when your app has several features it's impossible to show it all. The press didn't even cover some of the coolest hacks in my opinion, like http://pokebattle.herokuapp.com , http://bbcat.co , http://electioneering.us , and http://notableapp.herokuapp.com , and some more I can't recall. I understand that it's hard for them to deal with so many participants though (it was may more than they had planned), so I applaud them for their effort and expect them to improve their plans accordingly for the spring event, which will definitely be just as popular if not more-so.

I definitely felt like the judging was rushed; given the pinch on time, I liked a lot of their choices though. Do you know if J.A.M. actually even worked? I really liked where they were going, but it didn't look like the app actually worked even close to as well as the other music transcribers out there, so I was pretty surprised when they won. Although I definitely thought they were moving in a cool direction, I don't know how the judges could tell if their app actually worked or not at all.

Loved http://snapsite.me !

haha I decompiled their jar the other day actually, and they basically just combined abc4j with the YIN method of finding fundamental frequency for sound and, a table between frequencies and notes. I doubt it works nearly as well as most alternatives, because they made no provisions for noise in the signal or other complications. Very simple implementation even by hackathon standards, but it was presented like magic so I'm not surprised they wowed the judges. One of the team members even said this though "We just used Java, which is really basic programing. We didn’t even use fancy web app stuff, which is why we didn’t expect this at all. I don’t even know what to say about this" -theDP

http://snapsite.me/ is pretty cool. It takes a Facebook Page and makes a professional looking webpage out of it.

e.g. https://www.facebook.com/TheEconomist to http://www.snapsite.me/home.php?id=804

It helps less tech savvy businesses only know how to operate a facebook page have a decent web presence.

Our team made Batt Signal https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/pennapps-fall-2012/h...

Allows you to notify your friends when your battery drops low.

We got Zynga’s award for Bay Area Favorite :)

Hey Brett! Nice post. I had a BLAST mentoring at PennApps - these kids could teach everybody a lot about enthusiasm and hard work. It's always inspiring when you have so many great minds in one place.

Look for my post about it as well, coming soon..

I really liked Dashdisco: http://dashdis.co/ Making music by coding can be a new way to teach an amateur how to code well. This app has so much potential!

We for sure had a ton of fun making http://buddyhack.com and it was a crazy adventure right before our demo to pivot to http://hackmyfacebook.com

The filepicker.io guy was an awesome mentor, along with many of the other mentors that were there(Rob from Twilio!).

Super awesome experience; Michigan Hackers looks forward to coming back with even more hackers in January(We rallied 20 hackers to go less than a week before the event).

There is a full listing of hacks here: https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/pennapps-fall-2012/h...

this is great. impressive hacks out there and crazy to see what college students can build in a short amount of time. http://www.snapsite.me is a pretty cool concept definitely commercializable.

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