The weekend of September 17th, scriptr.io sponsored the NASA Space Apps Next Gen hackathon in Manhattan at eBay headquarters. All of the competitors were high schoolers (and one very sharp seventh grader) who had access to hardware such as Intel Edison boards and a 3d printer. Read on to learn more about some of the impressive projects they came up with:
Lux Deluxe
Anthony Autera, Zarir Hamza and Matt Chou made Lux Deluxe, a hat equipped with an Edison board that monitors the vitamin D levels of the person wearing it. If the wearer didn’t spend enough time outside, they would be warned that they needed to get some sunlight. They used scriptr.io as their backend to keep track of how much sunlight the wearer was exposed to, as well as using the Google Charts module to create graphs of light exposure each day. They won best use of scriptr.io, and received $500!
Digital Distance
Digital Distance is an app that measures any distance with a smartphone, using only the accelerometer! Poojit Hegde, Kunal Adhia and Abhishek Patel used scriptr.io to take raw data collected by a smartphone and analyze it to determine the distance the phone moved. Because their app worked entirely off the phone’s hardware, rather than relying on GPS, it is capable of working in space! They won the runner up prize for scriptr.io, netting them $200! In addition, they won best use of sensors at the hackathon, winning them a meeting with Clerky, a company that helps innovators handle all the legal work required to make a startup!
EVA-S
Karl Roush made EVA-S , an searchable archive of NASA data about Extra-Vehicular Activity in space by the US and Soviet Union since the 1960s. It provides the data in an easily searchable format, allowing the user to retrieve it by date and by nation. EVA-S uses scriptr.io to retrieve the data and serve up the frontend html, making it a full stack scriptr.io web app! Karl was one of the overall winners of the hackathon, and got a quadcopter drone and the chance to participate in the global Space Apps Next Gen contest!
Space Cheese
Shein Htike made Space Cheese, a game where the player must fly a spaceship whilst collecting cheese and avoiding the asteroids around them. The game supports multiple players, and was built with Melon JS. Shein used scriptr.io to gather and format NASA data about asteroids, so that the asteroids in the game were actually based on real asteroid data from NASA for a given date! Shein won the best video game category, and received a VR headset!
Scriptr.io and Space Apps
I was impressed with all the different use cases the hackathoners came up with for scriptr.io. From being a data collector, to using it to bind together different APIs, to creating a full stack web application, scriptr.io provides many ways to create complex applications with ease. I’m excited to see what ideas scriptr.io will be used for at future hackathons!
