HackCooper 2014!

"High Frequency Stealing" reflex game

Last weekend, we were at HackCooper, Cooper Union's inaugural, official and excellent hackathon, organized by create@cooper - a student organization focused on empowering builders (yeah!).

41 Cooper Square is a fantastic location for a hackathon, with plenty of space and access to the EE lab, laser cutter, 3D printers and more (see Matt Innes' blog on hardware hackathons last week). It's also beautiful:

It must also have been fairly comfortable because many people didn't leave the building and stayed up all night.

Octopart T-Shirt sightings

I spent some time with Victor, Brian, Jeffrey and Shan who made Facial Recognition Sentry -- a nerf gun which turns and shoots when it detects a face. The base and trigger of the nerf gun are controlled by an Arduino with facial detection via webcam using OpenCV. For hardware, they used an Arduino, motor/servos, a laser-cut acrylic base, an Arduino R3 Motorshield, and batteries. Since they didn't have a drill and the laser cutter was pretty booked all weekend - they used a lot of duct tape:

Scrappy!

It worked beautifully during demos:

Preparing to demo the Facial Recognition Sentry

Here are a few with photos posted online:

• The Delta Robot Icing Printer
• The Modular Camera

We were excited to see so many hardware hacks (10 out of the 26 demos!) and amazed by the quality of each one. On the heels of Matt's blog, HackCooper was a great example of how to run a successful hardware hack day. Thanks to the organizers, who were all pretty impressive before we showed up, and then even more impressive after we got to know them over the weekend.

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p/s: look what we found sitting pretty in an unassuming corner of the EE lab! Check out who signed it.

Rhymes with "Bozniak"