Yay! I got accepted to MHacks V, one of the top collegiate hackathons in the world. (OK, admittedly, "the world" here consists mostly of North America, just like calling the SF Giants the "World Champs" really means that they only beat out the other US baseball teams. But it's still a massive hackathon with over a thousand people!)
What is a hackathon?
According to Google, "hackathon" is codeword for "collaborative coding party". In reality, thousands of people gather at a venue with their laptops, ideas, Arduinos, caffeinated drinks, and best coding skills to form many groups of 4-5 people and attempt to change the world through technology and programming.
Technology and programming? Change the world? What?
In my last post, I mentioned something I had built at a hackathon, called Lif3 (pronounced "life cube"). Well, let's elaborate.
In nerd-speak, Lif3 is a CubeSat bioreactor which is launched into space with an experiment of the user's choice inside for a time period specified by the user. While in space, Lif3 relays data on the experiment back to the user on Earth in near-real time using cloud-based analytics. This data can include – but is not limited to – temperature, video feed, and frequent pictures of the experiment as it is set up in the cube. Most other data will depend on the specific experiment (e.g. cell count or glucose concentration for cellular cultures).
Translation: Lif3 is a 10x10x10cm cube which can be launched to space in a rocket and grow organisms for scientific purposes. It allows users to conduct experiments in space, without the user actually being in space. All experimental data is measured by the cube and sent back to the user via the Internet.
Tl;dr: This cube fits in your hand and lets you do biology experiments from anywhere.
Lif3 has more applications than just science in space. It can have a huge impact on schools in which larger labs are inaccessible to students, since each student or class can run the experiment in a small, portable environment. The portability of this technology is great, but something the users don't even need to worry about, considering the cube sends all the data to the users in any place anyway.
Want to know more about this weird cube-thing some friends and I made? You can find our website here, but bear in mind that the website isn't completely finished as we're focusing more on building/completing features of the cube.
Lif3 won the wetware category of the Magnitude.io Space Hackathon and was awarded the privilege of a summer 2015 launch to the International Space Station.
More Crazy Inventions: MHacks V
I really want to go to MHacks so I can build more awesome things like Lif3. However, the MHacks organizers were unable to offer me travel reimbursement from San Francisco, CA to Detroit, MI. To this effect, I'm crowdfunding my way to MHacks here. If you have a couple bucks to spare, I'd love it if you could help me get there. (If everyone reading this gave $5, we'd be done in an hour.) Similarly, if you find a cheaper flight – send it my way. Even if you can't spare money, it'd be great if you could pass this campaign around to your friends.
After MHacks, expect an update on what I built. I'd offer periodic updates throughout the weekend, but hackathons are intense, and I will likely have no spare time. I'll try to jot down some progress notes as the weekend progresses, though, so everyone can see what goes into inventing something in 48 hours.
Until then, I'll be brushing up on my Javascript. :)
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