Cisco Benelux Hackathon

Posted on by Tomas

My first hackathon

Phew, the schoolyear is almost over. But our teachers at Thomas More Highschool always have some surprises to end the year in a blast: this week we got to participate in the Cisco Benelux Hackathon!

The subject? Internet of things. We had 3 days to create (a working) IoT application, that benefits the environment. We were divided into small teams, and competed with each other. The two best teams of our entire group, got to represent our school at the Cisco conference in Liège.

Internet of Bees

iobeelogo

Since we had a beekeeper in our team, it was fairly easy to think of some problems the environment is facing daily: the decrease of the bee population. IoT became IoBee!

We made a prototype ‘smart beehive’, that kept optimal conditions for our bees to live in. Everything is monitored with sensors, and can be viewed from distance online. For the hardware we used a Raspberry pi, that ran all our scripts. It also hosted a beautiful website that we created in order to ‘sell’ our product to potential customers.

Pitch time

At the end of day three, all groups had a few minutes to pitch their applications in front of our teachers. They decided our project had the most potential, and we could accompany them to Liège to represent Thomas More Highschool in front of a professional jury.

AWESOME! We had our first victory.

The big moment

Next day it would finally happen! We arrived at the conference, and met the other winners from different schools in the Benelux. We were all very nervous, but also interested to see what the other groups had accomplished in the past few days. In the afternoon every group presented their application in front of the jury, and a winner was elected.

Results

IoBee got second place. This being our first ever hackathon, we were extremely happy with the result!