Hackathons are the popular things to do these days for people looking to get a taste of that fast-paced startup action. For those not acquainted with the concept, hackathons are events that typically cover a brief period of time (usually a weekend) where teams made up of people of various skillsets (engineering, design, coding, and business) get together and try to rapidly build or “hack” a product or service within a stated time constraint. These teams then compete with each other to present their ideas to judges who award prizes for creativity, execution, and overall excellence. Most teams barely eek out a minimum viable product by the end of a hackathon, but – as one team learned at Toyota’s OnRamp hackathon – that doesn’t mean you can’t take away the grand prize just for trying.

Journalist and indie filmmaker Boonsri Dickinson recently documented her experience on the winning team of a Toyota hackathon. The prompt of the hackathon was simple: Come up with creative ways of using the company’s onboard computer. And Boonsri and the team did just that. Aptly named “Eye In The Sky”, the group got together with the ambitious task of creating a drone that autonomously followed the Toyota test car around a track using the car’s Vehicle Data Visualizer system and drone mounted sensors. Using a ready-to-fly drone that supports use of open source firmware, the team aimed to program the backend software and frontend Android app interface in the span of 24 hours, so they could present a working model by the end of the event.

As Boonsri’s mini-doc shows though, roughly 24 hours was a bit of an ambitious timeline for what the team had planned. By the end of the hackathon, team Eye In The Sky failed to produce a working product. Luckily, their concept design and general idea was enough to impress the judges anyways, resulting in the team walking away with the grand prize and a check for $10,000.

It’s always refreshing to see new and innovative ways that people are using drone technology. If more drone builders and enthusiasts attended hackathons on a regular basis, then maybe we could see some really awesome products coming to market in the future. If you could decide, what creatives uses would you like to see drones be used for in 2015?