Over 800 hackers all over the world spent this weekend working on hacks and prototypes in the Global TADHack hackathon. Some were working from home, and others gathered at one of the 14 official locations. Matrix were physically present at the London and Lisbon locations, and we also handed out two prizes (a massive amount of tessel modules) to the best hacks using Matrix in some way or another.
After a hectic weekend, over 90 different hacks were submitted and presented. There was a live stream available (archive here) so that everyone could watch all the submissions. We were of course particularly interested in Matrix-related hacks, and there were several:
Matt Williams continued his Project Clearwater/Matrix integration from TADHack-mini London earlier this year; this time he added support for IM<->SIP MESSAGEs.
Sacha Nacar and Mike Dauphinais wrote a sign-language interpreter that uses Matrix for conversations.
Igor Pavlov made it possible for users of Lytespark to be contacted via Matrix and OpenMarket’s SMS AS when they are offline.
Phani Pasupula showed a PoC for using Matrix as a platform for starting a Dialogic XMS conference.
In the end, we had to pick only two of these awesome hacks, which wasn’t easy. We are really encouraged by seeing the Matrix ecosystem grow bigger – and more bridges to various existing systems being built; this is exactly what Matrix needs!
We awarded our two prizes to Igor for his use of OpenMarket’s SMS AS, which adds a new and very wanted feature to Lytespark – and Sacha/Mike for their inventive sign-language -> Matrix translator. Congrats to all of you! We were also happy to see Phani win one of Dialogic’s prizes with his hack!
Below you can watch our two winners’ presentations:
Next weekend, June 13 and 14, the global TADHack takes place all over the world. You can participate on site or remotely, and there are a lot of different prizes to be won – in total the prize pot is worth $35k!
For the best two hacks using our technology, we will award a whole lot of Tessel modules! Tessel is a new breed of development board that runs entirely on Node.js, and they come with different modules you can plug in – for more information, see: getting started & sample projects.
Both prizes will include several tessel modules, including:
multiple core tessel boards
multiple servo modules and many servo motors
multiple ambient modules
multiple accelerometer modules
camera module
GPS module with antenna
microsd module
bluetooth module
audio module
climate module
relay module
RFID module
DIY module kit
Matrix.org will be present at the London site, Idea London in Shoreditch, where we will help both local and remote participants (via #matrix:matrix.org) using the Matrix APIs as part of their hacks.
So if you have some spare time next weekend – why not have a think about what could be a cool hack and join us for the global TADHack event! See you there!
We are back from Kamailio World, where we presented and participated in James Body’s “Dangerous Demos”. We were racing against the deadline, but managed to join the demos at the very last minute – and even win the award for “Most Entertaining Demo”!
It was great to catch up with old acquaintances – and meet many new ones! There were only around 150 people at Kamailio World, but given the area of expertise is very specialised, you can pretty much start talking to anyone and have a really interesting conversation.
A video from the dangerous demo event is available here:
The Parrot Drone we use in the demo has a 14 megapixel fisheye camera with advanced stabilization techniques which means that you can’t actually see what happened when everybody went “ooh” – I assure you the “flip” command does exactly what you would expect!
Thanks to everybody who talked to us at Kamailio – and as always, come find us in the #matrix:matrix.org room on Matrix!
In our continuous journey around the world to promote Matrix, this week we have come to Kamailio World in Berlin, Germany. During the conference, there will be 5 technical workshops and 28 presentations about SIP, VoIP, WebRTC and other real time communication technologies – and Matthew will talk about Matrix at 11am on Friday.
I’m looking forward to lots of interesting talks (full schedule here), including an open discussion panel with Randy Resnick about real-time communications at 17:10 Thursday evening. Of course there will also be dangerous demos – and hopefully lots of people interested in Matrix! If you are going to the conference, please come and say hello – we will be exhibiting as well as presenting, and we will be there all day Thursday and Friday.
Amandine and I just got back from WebRTC World 2015 in Miami – the conference was a great success: a fantastic opportunity to meet up with many of the companies who are supporting Matrix and give everyone an update on what Matrix is up to with our Keynote: Defragmenting the Internet for fun and non-profit!.
We also had a little too much fun in the demo shoot-out – hooking up a Parrot Bebop quadrocopter into Matrix using a Matrix-enabled Janus WebRTC Gateway. The problem here is that the Parrot firmware and C SDK provides H.264 video, but doesn’t package it up at all for use with WebRTC – let alone using interoperable signalling like Matrix. So this is a classic use of Matrix to expose a simple open consistent interface to a system which is otherwise is stuck with a proprietary non-web-friendly API. The code hasn’t been tidied up yet, but our hacked Matrixified fork of Janus is up at https://github.com/matrix-org/janus-gateway/tree/ardrone3 if anyone has a drone and is crazy enough to want to experiment with it :)
Meanwhile, we also showed OpenWebRTC-powered VoIP on the latest develop iOS Matrix Console app talking hardware-accelerated H.264 through to Firefox on the desktop. My ancient 2010 MacBook Pro did its best to sabotage the demo (turns out that 1080P AirPlay + Firefox WebRTC is a bridge too far), but it gave a good idea of what’s to come. Many thanks to the OpenWebRTC team for lots of help in getting the demo together in time!
It turns out that all the demo excitement was worth it in the end, as the jury seemed to like what Matrix is up to and was kind enough to award us more points than any of the other 13 demos… meaning that we won Best In Show!!. Huge thanks to the judges for believing in the Matrix vision, and congratulations to all the other demoists too :)
…and the actual video stream that the drone transmitted before I crashed it (recorded on Janus) is at…
Finally, our grand finale was meant to be combining the two demos, and showing OpenWebRTC decoding the H.264 from the Drone in hardware on an iPhone – using Matrix of course to set up the call and control the drone. Alas a TURN-related bug got in the way of this working, but we just fixed it up in the office this morning, and I’m proud to show the first ever Parrot Bebop -> Janus -> Matrix -> OpenWebRTC video stream!! (and very exciting it is too…)
Huge thanks again to Dave for doing the Matrix integration with Janus, Stefan and Rob from OpenWebRTC for all the help on the OWR side, and Manu & Giom for porting the OpenWebRTC pull request to MatrixKit and landing it in iOS Console Develop for the demo!
Matrix.org is happy to be sponsoring and talking at the WebRTC Conference and Expo in Miami, Florida, 12-14 May. Both Amandine and Matthew will be there – please come have a chat by booth #22! This is one of the longest running WebRTC Events, and Matthew is delivering one of the keynotes of the conference on Wednesday 4:00-4:30pm in room K-07.
Matthew will also participate in the “Open Source Options for WebRTC Development” session in room D2-02 at 9:50am on Wednesday (full agenda here).
Finally, Matrix will also be part of the WebRTC World Demos in room X-07 sometime between 4:30 and 7:30pm on Wednesday. Expect a dangerous demo!
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