2014 AT&T Developer Summit Hackathon

Hackathons are a great way to stay up to date on the latest technologies as well as for keep your coding chops fresh. At the beginning of this month Anthony Lai, Raymond Xie, Mark Vilrokx (honorary AppsLab member) and I participated in the AT&T Developer Summit Hackathon. The event was held at Palms Casino and Resort in Las Vegas. The Internet of Things played an important role. New technologies that allow us to pinpoint our indoor location aka micro-location were all the rage. I am huge advocate for the technology that powers this: bluetooth low energy or BLE. Both winning teams used BLE beacons in their projects.

This was the second year that I attended and this time I came back with (almost) the whole team. We had a blast. During the hackathon there were two main tracks. A Wearables track and a Mobile track. There were a lot of sponsors that provided APIs to their products. Between AT&T and sponsors there were ample devices and gizmos available for us to hack with.

I won’t go into much detail about our project, but you will hear more about it later. Our team decided to participate in the Wearables track with an emphasis on public safety.  We decided to use AT&T’s M2X platform, which is AT&T cloud’s solution for the Internet of Things and they have branded it as “Machine to Everything.” This includes a basic REST interface to allow devices input and output data. We also used a Freescale FRDM-KL46Z micro-controller with ARM libraries provided by mbed. And if that weren’t enough, our project included our beloved Google Glass and a couple awesome Phillips Hue lights for visual notifications.