OpenSauce Hackathon
Cardiff Computer Science Community
Project maintained by HenryHoggard and georgesale Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham
The OpenSauce Hackathon
Saturday 10th and Sunday 11th March saw the first Open Sauce Hackathon, hosted by Cardiff University School of Computer Science and Informatics.
The event, hosted over these two days, saw students competing to design a 'hack' - a new 'something' designed in a very short amount of time. The event was organised by students Geraint Harries, Tom Ashworth, Joe Redfern, and Henry Hoggard.
These 'somethings' included:
Winrars! - Flax Capacitor
Flax Capacitor designed a zombie-killing survival game using Java. Using all their own components, they designed from the ground up a game where the object is to survive the onslaught of zombies for as long as possible, making for a long, complicated project which they skilfully managed to produce a fun (but terrifying) game! GithubIndividual Hacker Award! - Matt Williams
Matt worked on the ingenious Motion Kitty project, which used a board similar to the Raspberry Pi to play Spotify tracks when motion is detected. He was chosen by the judges to be awarded the Individual Hacker award, winning a Raspberry Pi. Github TwitterRunners Up! - Status Map
Callum, Tom and Matt worked on a Twitter app, which lets users track 'trends' by location - for example, we could see people tweeting about #cfhack were almost exclusively based in Cardiff! This exciting project used the trends, combining them with geo-location information from the individual tweets, to display the results on a map. www GithubScarf in a Fruit Bowl
SiaFB put together a website that collected information about housing in Cardiff, by using information 'scraped' from traditional letting agency websites. Effectively, they designed a massive database of housing from many different sources, which could be sorted by different factors (size, price, etc), and could make searching for a house a lot easier. GithubDreadful Fish
Dreadful Fish worked on a text-expansion/text-reduction program. Ever had one of those essays where it just won't go over the word count? No problem. Their program can automatically expand contractions (they borrowed the dictionary from an AI ChatBot called Alice). For example, can't becomes can not, totting up the word count for that essay that's just a bit too short. Furthermore, it could reduce the word count by doing the opposite! www GithubPhuu's Markov Chain
Tom/Phuu worked on a program which could predict what you type based on what you've already written. This program used something called a Markov Chain, which actually was pretty complicated! So, when used, this program can try and predict what should happen - this could have great uses in helping to make scanning printed text into a computer a lot easier! GithubCreamSlop
CreamSlop worked on a Last.fm visualisation web app for music heads. The app showed trends by music genre in easy-to-understand graphs, so the user can see interesting stats about what they've been listening to. Turn it up! GithubMotion Kitty
Motion Kitty worked on a Raspberry Pi/Motion-Detecting Cat mashup. Using a board very similar to the Raspberry Pi (it isn't out yet!), they coded a program to stream music from Spotify to the device, and switch it on and off via the motion-detecting cat, creating a very cheap room-to-room music streaming system. Github26 Miles of Code
26 Miles of Code invented a new type of content management site. Being unimpressed and dissatisfied with the current status quo of content management sites, they set to build a totally new system, with easy ways for users to see what they want, when they want, in a beautiful way, using a HTML5 website also using JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL. The most important features of this were design and usability, creating a beautiful and function content management system differing from the norm.Thanks to George Sale for the write up. You can find more of his work on his blog