At the end of September, TADHack Global was held where almost 150 teams spent their weekends hacking towards the $45k total prize money up for grabs. Luke spent the final day of the hack talking to teams hacking at IDEALondon in Shoreditch, meeting a few Matrix enthusiasts and long-time collaborators.
Out of 10 hacks, 2 of 4 local winners won prizes locally and went on to be global winners alongside 6 other teams using Matrix as part of their hacks. Checkout the TADHack London Wrap-up for details on all of the awesome hacks, especially Aviral Dasgupta‘s Pushtime and Polite.ai.
Well done to everyone who took part, and a special thanks to those flying Matrix :)
THE Port 2017
The following weekend was THE Port 2017, a humanitarian-themed hackathon held at CERN, Geneva in Switzerland. Among the 7 teams participating, the Matrix team consisted of a few software developers from Bity including Matrix enthusiast Alejandro Avilés (who very kindly helped us get a team into the hackathon). Luke and Dave from the Matrix London office also flew out to help the cause and by the end had a very stable, working prototype by the end of the competition.
The hack we made was a communications system backed by Matrix for use in refugee camps, an idea that hatched at the start of the hackathon (whereas the other projects were well established ideas up to 6 weeks before the event). Check out the code on GitHub if you’re interested in the client-side apps we made over the weekend.
TADHack Global 2016 was held across 30+ different locations last weekend. The goal in the TADHack is to create a hack over the weekend, using one or more of the APIs provided by the sponsors – of which Matrix is one.
Over 2600 people participated, and over 150 hacks were created! I think it’s safe to say that TADHack Global 2016 was a great success!
The Matrix team were on location in Shoreditch, London, where we helped people with their hacks (while also keeping an eye on the online TADHack Matrix room to help remote entries).
Several teams used Matrix in their hack, both in London and elsewhere:
In Lisbon, Luis Tonicha and Tiago Dias created “Athos”: a bot for shopping assistance. The bot accepts various queries which it tries to answer using Carrefour’s API. The team also created a Telestax bridge, so you can send the queries via SMS! This hack won the Lisbon location prize! Watch their presentation here.
A team in Moscow did a hack using Matrix, where they created a kind of MUD in Matrix. Unfortunately, the presentation is not currently available.
Yelly was a remote entry by Fikri Fırat, Utku Yavuz, and Barış Erbil. It is a voice message based chat application inspired by the nature of shouting as a way of communication. See their presentation here.
In Kiev, Ukraine, the DataArt team (Artem Malykhin, Pavlina Bevz, Igor Maximenko, and Eugene Grachev) created a hack called “Web conference for Smart TV”: an app for Smart TVs for VoIP conferencing. See the presentation here.
Over in Chicago, Sergio Gil, Caterina Lazaro, and Anup Mohan created “Little Endian Kitchen”: Shopping management for your kitchen. The idea was to have a webcam in your fridge that can check which items are “missing” (e.g. which ones need replacing) and even provide a VoIP stream so you can check yourself (even using VR-goggles!) – see the presentation here.
In Berlin, there were quite a few hacks. One of these was called “Clipboard Monkey” and was made by Tim Unkrig, Tammo Behrends, Markus Kerschkewicz. This team created a decentralized, universal and fully encrypted clipboard using Matrix. See the full presentation here. We awarded this hack one of the two global prizes of a MacBook Air! They were also joint winners of the Berlin location prize – well done!
Finally, in London we had several teams working on Matrix hacks. There was the “Moodlight” hack by Astrid de Gasté, Ryan Lintott, Tomas Zezula, Istvan Hoffer, and Jing Chan. The team created a sentiment analysis bot connecting Riot/Matrix to Philips Hue, and analysing the comments in a room using a Social Sentiment Analysis library – blue light for positive comments and red for less positive chat. Watch the presentation here. This hack won the London Location Prize!
Also in London, there was Immanuel Baskaran’s “Hangouts Bridge” hack, which bridged Matrix to Google Hangouts! Presentation here. In classic “dangerous demo” fashion, Google Hangouts experienced an outage just when the demo was happening. We awarded this hack the Special Matrix Prize – congrats Immanuel!
“Matrix of Things” by Matt Williams, and Yin Yee Kan won the other Matrix global prize, which was a MacBook Air. They created a minimal Matrix client on a ESPB266 micro controller, and added a proximity sensor feature to Riot so that two different devices can notice when they are in close proximity. See the presentation and demo here!
Congrats to all the participants – we hope you had a lot of fun! The full list of winners is available over on the TADHack blog.
And if the hackathon has inspired you to hack on Matrix, please come chat to us in #matrix-dev or the TADHack Matrix room!
TADHack-mini took place in east London over the weekend with 88 people in attendance. There were $8k in prizes, and five different services to hack on. This time, we didn’t have too many people using Matrix in their hack, but we did have an excellent idea and implementation called Babelonio, who won our prize: a Phantom X Hexapod Mk3!
Babelonio adds speech-to-text and translation via Google translate to Matrix, via the Vector client and a Chrome extension. This is quite nice, because it means you don’t have to run a custom client. And by using Google translate, you immediately get access to a lot of languages (although sometimes the translation doesn’t quite work, as you can see in the presentation video). The project was done by Steven Bakker, Timo Uelen and Bart Uelen. You can see the presentation and demo of the hack here.
A good write-up of all the hacks and winners can be found on the TADHack blog.
Thanks to the TADHack organisers for another fine event, and also to everyone who came over to chat about Matrix – and again congratulations to the Babelonio team:
It’s soon time for the 2nd TADHack-mini London. The event starts at 10am on Saturday April 9th and hacking continues until the projects are pitched, starting at 1pm on Sunday April 10th. As you can see by the many previous TADHacks, every hackathon brings interesting and impressive projects, so we are again expecting great things!
As usual, there are great prizes to be won – worth around $5k in total. This time, we will award the best Matrix-related hack a PhantomX AX Metal Hexapod Mark III from Trossen Robotics, a build-it-yourself hexapod robot kit! The robot is built on an entirely open source platform, complete with 3D cad models of the robot, open software, and schematics for the electronics.
If you’re planning to attend TADHack-mini London: see you there! If not – why aren’t you? Consider spending a day and a half hacking on some cool technologies – it could be well worth your time!
You can be one step ahead by getting acquainted with the Matrix C-S API or the AS API. And if you have any questions – or want to discuss potential hacks – please come talk to us in #matrix:matrix.org!
A weekend of intense prototyping and hacking at TADHack-mini Chicago is over, and we were very happy to again see some really interesting projects using Matrix!
Team ‘Vivo’ – Nestor Bermudez and Arin Sime – used Matrix, Tropo, and Telestax to create an Apple Watch app that notifies your loved ones when you are having a heart attack. Find more information here – and a recording of their presentation here. This project won the Telestax prize.
Charles Solar and Jiang Shuyang used Matrix and Flowroute resources for a platform independent app called ‘Samaritan’ which allows users to post help requests like “I got a flat tire!” or “My computer crashed!”. Others can then call / text / video chat with them to solve their problem. A video of their presentation can be seen here. This hack won the Flowroute prize.
Vladimir Beloborodov demoed his award-winning Matrix-hack from WebRTC Paris: using Matrix just to set up a WebRTC connection between his iPad and robot, thus proving that you can have a robot with telepresence functions without having to depend on a remote server – see his demo here.
Adnan Baleh, Caterina Lazaro, Javier Garcia, Ernesto G. Grabwosky, Sergio Gil and Marion Le Callonnec – Team ‘ProbatioNerds’ – created a mobile Matrix app to control the provided Trossen Robotics HR-OS1 Humanoid Endoskeleton robot over the Internet – even making it dance the Macarena! Presentation video can be seen here. We awarded team ‘ProbatioNerds’ the TADHack Matrix prize – an HR-OS1 – and we hope the team and the robot will keep learning new tricks and moves!
Daniel presenting the HR-OS1 to team ‘ProbatioNerds’ (Photo courtesy of Alan Quayle)
We keep being impressed by the quality of projects developed at TADHacks – remember, in practice you only have around 12 hours to work on your hack. Congrats to all who participated – and thanks to Alan for arranging it!
Matrix is sponsoring another TADHack, this time TADHack mini in Chicago on October 3-4. Come hack something cool together using Matrix, either in Chicago or remotely! At past TADHacks we’ve seen a robot controlled with Matrix, collaborative web page viewing with Matrix as the underlying protocol, and more.
As well as being lots of fun, we’ve teamed up with Trossen Robotics to offer a HR-OS1 Humanoid Endoskeleton for the best hack using the Matrix standard. The HR-OS1 is a hackable, modular, humanoid robot development platform designed from the ground up with customization and modification in mind. With a Raspberry Pi 2, webcam, wifi, bluetooth, and all of the limbs you expect for a human, there’s a lot of scope for exciting projects to be had with it!
I for one would love to ask an open source robot to bring me snacks over chat. (Wow that’s a sentence I never thought I would be able to say)
I’ll be on site, (and also hanging out in on Matrix in #matrix:matrix.org) to help out with whatever creative things y’all come up with – I hope to see you there!
Also in Chicago the following week I’ll be giving a tutorial on Federated Identity as well as attending and speaking about the problem of fragmented communication at the IIT Real-Time Communications Conference & Expo.
If you’re going to be around, please do say hi – I only recently joined the Matrix team, and there’s a lot of people I’ve yet to meet – I look forward to seeing you at one (or all) of these events!
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!
This weekend was spent at IDEA-London where the TADHack-mini London hackathon was going on. In total, there were around 18 different projects being hacked on all day Saturday and Sunday morning, before a 5-minute presentation on Sunday afternoon.
Four different projects used Matrix in one way or another: Matrixbot – a robot controlled through standard messages in a Matrix room – done by Scott Barstow and Anders Brownworth (project code and presentation video and picture). Neil Stratford’s hack included lighting up his roll of LEDs whenever a push-notification hit his Matrix webclient (picture from the presentation).
The Co-Browsify hack by Žilvinas Račyla and Augustinas Bacvinka allows two people to browse the same webpage, with scrolling events being collected and duplicated to the other browser via Matrix (picture from the presentation). Finally, Matt Williams of Metaswitch created a Project Clearwater/Matrix Gateway which enables Project Clearwater/IMS to set up WebRTC calls with any matrix user (project code and pictures from the presentation) – this is the first time we have had a SIP-to-Matrix call (let alone IMS-to-Matrix) set up!
As TADHack sponsors, Matrix had two Parrot Drones to hand out as prizes, and the winners for best Matrix-related hacks are Matt Williams for the Clearwater/Matrix Gateway – and Scott Barstow and Anders Brownworth for Matrixbot! We are also happy that the other two Matrix-related projects were rewarded with prizes from the other sponsors (full list of winners).
All in all it was a very productive weekend, both in terms of tech and also meeting people. Thanks to everyone who participated and especially those who worked on Matrix-related hacks!
Next up is the WebRTC conference and its related Kranky Geek event – which will be happen tomorrow and the day after. See you there!
As of 9am tomorrow, somewhere in the depths of East London (and remotely from around the world), a diaspora of elite VoIP/WebRTC/Telco developers will compete to build the most innovative and impressive communications demos at Tadhack Mini London! Dave, Oddvar and myself are going to be there from the core Matrix.org team, both on-site and online (at #matrix:matrix.org, of course) to provide support – especially to everyone who’s using Matrix APIs in their solution. And as we mentioned before, we’ll even be giving away two Parrot Bebop Drones to the best hacks built using Matrix!
It’s not too late to get involved – the more the merrier. We reckon it’s going to be a really fun weekend, so look forward to chatting to some of you soon!
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