Won a hackathon!

Dozens of developers from all over the country attended the first Hubanana hackathon, which was held last weekend in Raanana, Israel for around 24 hours. The focus this time was iBeacon, a technology which uses Bluetooth Low Energy proximity sensing to transmit a universally unique identifier that can be picked up by any compatible device, and which can then be used to determine a device’s physical location or to trigger a location-based action, among other possibilities.

It was a fun hackathon, and my team won first prize, which was an added bonus.

My team’s product for this hackathon was called BeaconTask. The idea was simple: leave beacons around the house, in specific “task stations”. When a family member arrives at this station (kitchen, backyard, etc) he can then receive a task, which is worth points. Example tasks can be: take out the trash, wash the dishes, etc. He can then accomplish this task and take a photograph of it, and the “Manager” (Mom/Dad/roommate/boss/etc) can verify the task has been completed. A verified task awards the person who performed it with points, which can then be used to receive various prizes or rewards. (e.g. allowance for kids, days off for an office)

During the hackathon, I improved python-firebase, a wrapper for Firebase’s RESTful API. The forked version can be found here and includes caching.

I mostly worked on synchronizing the various team members, and also developed the back-end and data-model. All of the source code for our team’s project can be found here:
https://github.com/ibeacon-hackathon

Articles (in Hebrew) regarding this hackathon can be found here and here

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