We are CI&T Japan, part of the global digital technology agency CI&T. Our team of experts perfectly mix Lean Principles, Design Thinking and Agile Development techniques to provide Global, Regional and Japanese enterprises what it takes to digitally transform themselves in the Japanese market. We are really glad to have you here today and we hope you have fun with us!
A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest or codefest) is a design sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development collaborate intensively on software projects. Hackathons usually are about specific subjects and today the subject is "Change the world with IoT".
Although the main target for today's event is to have fun, there are a few rules and regulations that you need to be aware about in order to be eligible to become today's winner.
All the participants will be split in 4 different groups. Each team member will be decided in a draw, however in order to balance the groups the event organization might split some people based on their professional profiles. The group members need to organize themselves and work as a team. However each team can use only 1 computer and 1 Raspberry Pi. The event organization will provide a set of devices for each group composed of the following:
(1) A Raspberry Pi 3 Model b+
(2) A humidity and temperature sensor (DHT11)
(3) An air pressure sensor (BMP180)
The Raspberry Pi is already connected to Firebase's Firestore database and saving the data that is been read from the sensors each 5 minutes and displayed in a Web interface.
The proposed idea must be related to "Change the world with IoT" theme. In other words, the group need to come up with ideas related to things that may help on world causes such as saving natural resources, saving the environment, sustainability, education or anything that may be helpful for the humanity as a whole. It is mandatory to use at least (1) Raspberry Pi, (2) One of the sensors provided by the organization and (3) Firebase, however you can modify the project or include any other technologies as wanted.
The winning group will be decided according the following table:
| Criteria | Points |
|---|---|
| Code quality & Technical Difficulty | 40 |
| Teamwork | 35 |
| Impressiveness | 10 |
| Usefulness/Practicality | 10 |
| Business Potential | 5 |
| TOTAL | 100 |
The organization will evaluate not only the technical difficulty of the code produced during the event but also the code quality. The code should follow best practices, be standarlized, structured, well organized and documented.
Teamwork is one of the most important judging criteria! It is necessary work as a team, being well organized and syncronized, split the tasks among the team members and communication is a key attribute.
In this criteria the organiation will evaluate how impressive your group idea is. Innovation and originality are key attributes here.
This criteria is about how feasible, useful and practical the proposed idea is.
This criteria will take into consideration the business potential of the proposed idea considering how applicable it is for the market.
Our CI&T's skilled Engineers have prepared a codebase at github. The solution is already up and running, end to end.
Your mission is to evolve this code to something really cool that will make your group to be today's winner. But be careful! The time is short and it is necessary to come up with an idea that you will be able to finish by 18:00.
There is a Raspberry Pi with 2 sensors connected on it. The first sensor (DHT11) is reading information about both temperature and humidity.
The second one (BMP180) is measuring the atmosphere pressure.
This Raspberry Pi will save the information to Firebase's Firestore database each 5 minutes.
There is a dashboard hosted by Firebase that is reading the information and displaying on the screen. You can acccess the dashboard from the following URLs:
https://ciandt-hackathon-g2.firebaseapp.com
The following diagram illustrates the overall architecture of the solution that was explained in the previous section:
This section will introduce the technologies used on this Hackathon.
Firebase is a product powered by Google which allows to build apps fast, without managing infrastructure.
On this challange, we will use Firebase for host our web application and our database.
https://firebase.google.com/
Please be informed that there is a limit of free API calls that can be done to Firebase. Please check the details in here:
https://firebase.google.com/pricing
The Raspberry Pi is a series of small single-board computers. The sensors will be plugged in Raspberry Pi which will send the information to Firebase's database.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/
The official github repository (https://github.com/geovanneb/ciandt-hackathon) for the Hackathon is using the following folder structure:
ciandt-hackathon
├── iot #contains the python code shipped on Raspberry Pi
├── main.py #main python file
├── vendor #contains third party libraries
├── web-ui #contains the Firebase project (Web UI).
├── firebase.json #Firebase's configuration file
├── public #contains Web UI HTML / CSS / JS files
Make sure that the event organization have granted you permissions on your github account. It is very important during the Hackathon to keep frequently pushing your progress to github, so the organization can check the code being produced by your team. That will also be a part of the evaluation. Refrain from pushing all code at once just at the end of the event!
Clone the repository on your computer:
$ git clone git@github.com:[your-repository]
Install Firebase CLI:
npm install -g firebase-tools
Make sure that you have a google account and that someone from the event organization has granted you admin permissions to your group's Firebase account.
Go to https://console.firebase.google.com Login with your Google Account and select your project.
Go back to the command line and login with the correct account.
firebase login --interactive
If you are logged in with the wrong account run logout with the following command and select the correct account
firebase logout
You can validate your Web UI at any time by running it on your local computer before deploying to Firebase hosting. make sure you are in the web-ui folder and run the command below. Depending on which group you belong to change the project-id to the project id of your group. Your project-id is:
ciandt-hackathon-g2
firebase serve --project [project-id]
After checking on your local computer, you can deploy your application to Firebase hosting and make it available online:
firebase deploy --only hosting --project [project-id]
After deploying, it should be available from the following URL address (depending on your group number):
https://ciandt-hackathon-g2.firebaseapp.com
There is a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse that is plugged to your Raspberry Pi. Look at your monitor. You should see the operation system interface that is running on your Raspberry Pi. There is an IDE called Thonny that can be accessed under Menu > Programming. Thonny is a new IDE (integrated development environment) bundled with the latest version of the Raspbian with PIXEL operating system. Using Thonny, it’s now much easier to learn to code. Thonny comes with Python 3.6 built in, so you don’t need to install anything.
When you start Thonny, you’ll see a new script editor and a shell. As with Python 2/3 IDLE, you enter a program in the script editor and run it in the shell. You can then use the shell to interact directly with the program; accessing variables, objects, and other program features.
You might want to change or add new sensors to your Raspberry Pi. You can refer to the image below for Devices' GPIO information:
We wish you have fun and hope we can CHANGE THE WORLD together!