Since October, Philadelphia has become a testing ground for machineQ, a new Internet of Things business being developed by an innovative team at Comcast. This new technology can gather, transmit and create intelligence from the physical world, and has the potential to improve ways to monitor public infrastructure, enable predictive maintenance on consumer appliances, and other exciting implementations. This kind of connectivity will have a huge impact on how we think about solving challenges and innovating in our cities.
machineQ is a low-power wide-area network, which uses LoRaWAN technology to connect to sensors, which can activate measurements and create change in the physical landscape. It is designed for simple, yet critical transmissions, like a sensor telling a system that the temperature in a room has changed dramatically, or a bus in the city is running late. The network is low-power, optimized for 10+ years of battery life and minimal maintenance. And the network is wide-reaching, able to connect to sensors that are up to 30 miles away and reach sensors deep within urban environments.
This hackathon is meant for developers who are interested in Internet of Things technology and creating solutions that integrate sensor-based hardware with software. Each developer team at the hackathon will have access to devices, sensors, a network server, and application server in order to create solutions for a smarter city using LoRaWAN technology. It’s up to the developers to augment this base system with dev-friendly APIs to create solutions.
In one day, teams will be able to get familiar with these new technologies (LoRaWAN, Marvin/Arduino, ClearBlade, sensor technology) and create applications that interact with sensors, like visualizations, dashboards or other interactive demos. Attendees will come to deeply understand the technologies involved, the data and workflow and how they can harness it for future ideas.
Marvin plug-n-play IoT development boards which collect data from sensors and transmit that data via LoRaWAN network technology. These are Arduino-based devices which can utilize multiple sensors and can communicate to the network. You can learn more about Marvin boards here.
ClearBlade application server, a dev-friendly environment used to create applications for displaying and collecting sensor data across the network. ClearBlade provides SDKs available for iOS, Android, JavaScript, Java, GoLang, NodeJS, Python and C. You can read more about the ClearBlade development ecosystem here.
To start, all attendees that participate in the hackathon competition on June 9 and 10 will get to take home their own Marvin IoT development board, valued at $90.
Prizes will be awarded to the teams that demonstrate the most innovative smart city solutions using LoRaWAN technology and will be judged by creativity, problem-solving, and use of the full hardware/software tech stack.
1st: $5,000
2nd: $2,500
3rd: Team members each receive $200 gift cert. to Adafruit
The winning teams and ideas will also be shared during the adjacent LoRa Alliance summit, where IoT network carriers from around the world will be gathered in Philadelphia.
In order to be eligible for hackathon prizes, projects built at this hackathon must use LoRaWAN technologies available onsite and must be submitted as open source projects, using the standard MIT License.
Due to demand, this event is now sold out. Email events@technical.ly to join the waitlist.
