^^meet wearable Soliss
So I spent most of last weekend on the floor of UPenn's Levine building (crazy deja vu I was literally right here for Upenn scioly in March). I slept 7 hours of the 36 hour hackathon and coded like mad for the rest of it (no seriously I fell asleep while CODING). I didn't win an award this time, but built a super cool FUNCTIONAL WEARABLE : D (I applied skills from BWSI!)
1) What is Soliss?
Over my 36 h - 7h = 29h journey, I built Soliss with a team I found at the hackathon. This was a wearable that could track excess UV radiation hitting the skin and remind the wearer to reapply sunscreen. The wearable also connected to an app which allowed the user to track overall danger levels of UV radiation on their skin (calculated via a formal algorithm, and personalized to the user's demographic etc). Personally, I created the wearable part of the project (so all the hardware etc). In my 29 hours I prototyped/designed, breadboarded, coded, and the hardest part of all (that I should have left more time to)...took apart my precious breadboard and integrated the circuitry with the wearable.
Here is the devpost: https://devpost.com/software/sollis?ref_content=user-portfolio&ref_feature=in_progress
^^Us presenting/UI for Soliss
meet wearable Soliss^
meet breadboard V0 Soliss (I breadboarded it again with another arduino later)
^^meet my trusty sketchbook again which was used for iterative design of Soliss
2) Takeaways: GREAT/COULD BE BETTER
*Could be better: you couldn't...wear the wearable exactly. I didn't have enough time to sew in all the components, and I realized afterwards that my microcontroller had no way of being stitched into the fabric (big mistake)...next time choose components more wisely. I had to incorporate the breadboard ON the shirt : O This is an easy fix with the right microcontroller + access to soldering though
*I could have come up with a more elaborate idea/way to do this/could have brought supplies beforehand. I found NOW that a lot of people come to hackathons with ideas preplanned etc (some super cool person I met won edtech category and had their idea planned out in JUNE) so this is something I need to bring to my next hackathon
*Great: I gained so much confidence in my hardware skills. I had no idea I would build this and built a mock wearable in just one weekend (granted I didn't sleep but). Part of the reason I didn't preplan/bring hardware supplies was because I wasn't confident if I would get the chance to do hardware/could do it right. But now I know I can (and that I love to do it), so I can fearlessly bring all my materials on the next one
*Great: limited availability of materials meant I got creative with how to use them...including making a TEXTILE SENSOR out of GUM WRAPPERS : D
Overall, I learned so much from this hackathon. It was more competitive than HackMIT BP, I would say. A lot of people were from unis + there for venture funding/internships as well. I understood how hackathons work a bit better now (you should brainstorm beforehand!), gained confidence in my skills, and am happy with the project I walked out with. I am further encouraged to dive into skills like soft robotics + cover my blindspots in ML etc.
3) Side notes about the overall experience
^^Food @ Pennapps was
* AHAHAH the MERCH. SO MUCH FREE MERCH. I have to go next year for all the free stuff they gave. There were a lot of company sponsors too that gave out so many free items.
*Not a lot of people did hardware (in fact I think there were at most 10 hardware projects out of a 100) but there WAS a hardware "lab" which had like troves of hardware. This one guy from MLH just loaned out these pieces to us (and my team started calling him godfather because he was like a fairy godfather...I mean this guy had UV sensors lying around!)
*I met some really amazing people-- my team was super interesting too. They were from Virginia and Florida, and had a wealth of experience in Swift. They coded the software part of the project and it was SUPER neat. They also integrated an ML aspect which gave me some ideas for an app I'm trying to build on the side as well.
*Experience to remember: my team member and I didn't sleep the whole night and the first thing in the morning we went to go scout a local 7/11 to see if they had micro USB to USB-A cables because we needed this to connect to the ESP8266 microcontroller we had...she was pretty cool and does some administrative tasks for hack club (which of course led me to ask her if she could get me a cheat code to Athena's hackathon LOL).
*I also loved sharing this with my BWSI community, both my TA and friends. They all loved it and gave constructive feedback!
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