Brunel Tech Society is a community of Brunel University London students in technology-related degrees, or have a general interest in Technology. We are completely free to join, so if you have an interest in tech why not come and take a look?
We’re also a BCS Student Chapter, making us part of a vast network of talented and passionate students from the tech community across the country!
Hack Brunel V2 was a 24-hour STEM hackathon hosted by the Brunel Tech Society, running from 9 am on Saturday 19th November 2022 until 3 pm Sunday 20th November 2022.
The hackathon attendees consisted of ~70 participants from not only Brunel University London and neighbouring universities such as Royal Holloway & Birkbeck but also from as far as Spain and Boston, Massachusetts. Over the course of the weekend, we had students developing their ideas and projects, as well as taking part in many of our mini-events throughout the first day.
The event kicked off in the Howell Theatre with an opening ceremony, where all the attendees were given the opportunity to find teammates and discuss project ideas.
Teams of up to four made their way to the hackerspace in the Wilfred Brown Atrium, where they were able to collaborate with each other. They only needed a laptop to work with and any other techy equipment they wished to develop their project idea with.
Some teams brought extra monitors, Steam decks, Raspberry Pi and even robots!
There were multiple workshops taking place on Saturday including Tallest Paper Towers hosted by Innovia Brunel, An Introduction to Python hosted by GDSC Brunel, an Astronomy show and late-night movie in the Immersive 360 STEM dome, Cup-Stacking tournament hosted by HackathonsUK, and a CTF cyber-security SNYK challenge hosted by MLH! These workshops helped students to develop their transferrable, personal, and knowledge-based skills within a fun, learning atmosphere.
All teams were given an opportunity at the end of the event to present their hacks/projects in the Howell theatre and compete for a wide range of prizes ranging from 100$ of crypto, YubiKeys, drawing tablets, razer gaming sets, Amazon Echos and much more.
Our final main event project idea winners were: Trivia Bot
On the dawn of Saturday the 11th of December, we stumbled excitedly out of our beds at 03:00 on our first journey as a society. The night before, we had readily stuffed into our backpacks: laptops, chargers and a pack of energy drinks.
As the sun peeked over the horizon at 05:30, we grouped at London Euston, ready to tackle some problem-solving. After a quick stop at ‘Maccies’, our group slowly began forming and eventually, we gathered our teams.
We were treated to the exquisite economy seats (life of broke uni students) and after a 2-hour London Northwestern Railway journey, we had arrived in the wonderful area of Birmingham Bullring & Grand Central.
Upon arriving at Aston University, we were assigned our lanyards and a bunch of stickers for our morning ceremony. We were introduced to all the sponsors of the Hackathon and our theme was to build a website, app or project that includes some sort of communication.
We took part in many workshops during the event such as team-building exercises; constructing wooden models, cup-stacking challenges, super smash bros tournament, league of legends LANs and party games!
We also attended many skill-building workshops such as “How to create a Discord bot”, “GitHub for beginners”, “How to make a good submission”. We also had a midnight pizza feast and plenty of energy drinks to keep us awake all night!
After 24-hours of hard work, we managed to create fully functioning applications/websites! We eventually presented our ideas at the closing ceremony!
Our winning team researched that many individuals, who lack the ability to speak often, cannot benefit from the current speech-to-text technologies. They developed an accessible app that is capable of translating a variety of hand gestures/sign language into text. They used JavaScript and Python to develop this idea and as well as TensorFlow in order to make the application understand and track the joint locations and movements.
This team developed an app that provides you with information about how much alcohol a person can consume, based on certain information from the user such as age, weight, BMI, etc. Their aim was to make people more aware of their alcohol consumption limits. The user inputs information such as age, weight, height and the program creates a rough estimate of the ‘alcohol allowance’. Thereafter, the user can select what drinks they are consuming and also select the amount (in ml). The app then calculates and outputs to them what percentage of their alcohol allowance they have ‘used up’. They built the app in Java, using the Eclipse IDE and a tool called window-builder.
This team discovered how over complicated the biggest weather forecast websites are to use and they developed their own website to simplify the process of checking the weather forecast. They created a sleek, modern website that shows the weather according to your geolocation. They used javascript, HTML and CSS3 to create this as well as node.js and a weather API. There were many features they would have liked to implement, however they were limited on time.
The winning team from Nottingham was ‘Network over Rube Goldberg Machine’ who created a project where they “transmit data over unique and innovative layer 1 transport methods”. This was implemented with a “large amount of Raspberry Pi Pico microcontrollers all attached to a corkboard”! They received 144z gaming monitors as prizes!
Our team from Brunel ‘Sign to Text‘ landed 2nd place and received 4 SteelSeries gaming mice as prizes! We also won a squishy avocado for discovering the most insecurities in a website during the ‘Bobby Tables’ workshop!
For all of us who attended, this was our first Hackathon and we all successfully created a project which is a huge accomplishment for us!
I would like to congratulate all the teams who attended and presented amazing ideas as well as the sponsors, the Aston Computer Science Society for being wonderful hosts and HackathonsUK for leading many workshop activities!
Take a look here at our Committee.
Email address for society: Info@bruneltech.net
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