What do you call a weekend where instead of sleeping you spend the whole time building awesome things and learning about programming from really smart people? Some people call them hackathons, and this past weekend me and my friend Ed traveled to Princeton University to take part in our first one.

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a little intimidating when we first walked in. We were two hours late because of the time we had to leave State College, so we really didn’t know what was going on and it didn’t help that neither of us had been to a hackathon before so we didn’t know how these things worked in general. Luckily my friend Drew had given me the number of his friend from Penn State, Dan, who was also there. Once we found Dan and a small cohort of other Penn State guys, things started to progress much more smoothly.

One of the first things I noticed about the hackathon vibe is that everyone is really cool and genuinely interested in what you are building. Passers-by would often stop throughout the whole weekend to ask what we were working on and share their thoughts on any problems we were having. It was humbling to see how little I knew about programming compared to most of the people there. However, the intimidation factor I mentioned earlier quickly subsided as I got to know everyone and realized they were just like me but with a lot more knowledge in one specific area.

The HackPrinceton competition this year had both a hardware and software track, each with top prizes of $20,000. We were building a hardware project and had the opportunity to work out of the Princeton ELE lab. The facilities were amazing, and the IEEE had donated a ton of Arduinos, Raspberry Pi’s, and even some Leap Motion Controllers. It was pretty much hyenas fighting over a fresh kill when it came time to give out the hardware. I was lucky enough to pick up a Raspberry Pi.

I had the opportunity to try soldering for the first time when we were connecting our Adafruit CC3000 Wi-fi shield to our Arduino.

I was expecting the hackathon to have a lot of food/snacks based off what I had heard about other hackathons. But I was not prepared for the amount of food that they purchased for the event. There were over 1200 bagels for a group of slightly more than 250. There were pizzas as far as the eye could see to the point where they were just giving out entire boxes instead of slices. And the Red Bull… oh the Red Bull.. It seemed like more and more just kept materializing, a never ending supply of the miraculous golden liquid that enabled myself and my fellow hackers to resist the urge of succumbing to the expressly forbidden act of horizontal sleeping.

Aside from the food, the organizers of HackPrinceton also planned numerous activities, workshops, and speakers throughout the event. There were therapy dogs/puppies that came and visited, ice cream socials, workshops on Amazon Web Services and Arudino, as well as numerous other diversions. The speakers included CTO of the Huffington Post, John Pavely, and Princeton professor Edward Felten who gave a very interesting talk on cyber security and the efforts by the NSA to infiltrate networks, operating systems, and systematically weaken cryptography standards.

Now, you are probably wondering what it was we were building during this 48 hour hackathon… We decided to build a motion based laundry notification system. Using an accelerometer attached to an Arduino we monitored the change in motion of a washing machine to determine if the load was completed. I built a mock laundry machine out of a soda box, coffee cup, coffee stirrers, and a servo to simulate the effects of a washing machine.

The easy part for me and Ed was getting the laundry machine and laundry sensor working, but when it came time to figure out what to do with the output, we were kind of in a pickle. Luckily our extremely talented friend Dan offered to join the team and help us with the backend. He quickly whipped up a server and had it programmed using Node.JS and Mongo DB. It was tough to figure out how exactly the Arduino would communicate via the server over its wifi shield, but eventually we figured it out and had the whole thing running on a web app we decided to call Laundry Now. We also figured out how to integrate Venmo Payments into our app using the Venmo API so that users could pay for laundry using Venmo instead of quarters.

After not sleeping at all Sunday night, we wrapped up things around sunrise and decided to go for a walk to WaWa. It was pretty surreal walking around the deserted Princeton campus at sunrise after being in the basement hallway of the computer science building for almost 48 hours straight. However, despite the cold weather and how deliriously exhausted we were, the warm breakfast sandwiches helped tremendously.

I was able to sneak in a quick nap in one of the computer labs upon returning to the hackathon. After waking up we finished up submitting our project and found a spot in the atrium to demo our product. I think it went pretty well, and people were very intrigued by what appeared to just be a vibrating box with some wires sticking out. We went to the auditorium after the demos for the final round selections and didn’t hear our name called (kind of to our relief because we just wanted to go home and sleep), but it later turned out that we had been called and left the hackathon pre-maturely. Oh well…

Either way I can say I had a great experience at HackPrinceton and I’m glad I got to meet so many interesting and intelligent people. Looking forward to my next Hackathon.