Global TadHack 2021
My first experience with weekend coding events was a game jam where you have a weekend to create a game around a certain theme. I had a lot of fun and ended up meeting some friends who I still talk to. One of them, Vincent Tang, let me know about this event. Vincent is awesome and recently started a Florida community called TampaDevs which has a lot of Orlando people, like me, in it as well. I was happy to meet up with him again and we joined the same team. I also got to see German who was on my team at the 2019 game jam as well.
German made a fun project where you text a number and it adds it to a public blog.
There was a lot going on at this event and I did not get to meet all the teams or see what everyone was doing but still had tons of fun.
The team I was joining had some great minds on it and were already prepped with an idea of what to build. The team wanted to build a rescue bot which could find and assist in emergency situations. This would be used by first responders in areas where it might be too dangerous to send someone in to help. Recently in Florida a Miami building collapsed, in situations like that there is a lot of danger for the rescuers. Sending in a robot which can take pictures and speak to victims helps make sure the rescuers are safe. We had two great team members who had experience with hardware: Chris Woodle and Muntaser Syed. Chris was able to assemble the robot dog and Muntaser configured it.
The robot was able to be controlled through text, it could speak whatever was texted to it. There also was a function to take a photo, which would be texted back to the configured number.
Sending messages through text
They were also able to use this text messaging technology to ensure authentication with two factor auth. This would help secure the robot so only rescuers were able to operate it.
I worked on the frontend for this application. There were many planned features but considering the scope of the project and the limited time, we had to cut down on many. I built the frontend in React and the backend was written in Nest.js which is an opinionated backend framework. Our database solution was MongoDB.
I was able to get a great looking frontend but many aspects of the backend were still being written so I ended up moving on to sockets. Sockets were needed for live video to the robot, this would help for doing manual control of the robot. I used Agora to make for live video feed over websockets. This worked great and was able to get a live feed from a host to client.
I worked closely with Vincent to be able to have an api setup for the frontend to be able to speak to the backend which would control the robot's movements. There was also an interesting software I got to work with Davindra Tulsi. He is new to software development and was learning Python. He helped make a script which would generate a transcript text file from an audio file.
Building robot with a pi
There are a couple features like transcription Python script which are interesting to have but did not getting into the presented build of the project. Overall the event was very fun and was great to be working on a fast paced team where every success was exciting to experience live.
Sensor check
The blog post from tadhack covers the finer details and includes a long video covering many of the other presentation as well as the one by my team. My favorite other project was actually done by a professor at the school the event was hosted at, Valencia College. He made a automated musical script connected to hardware which could play notes texted to it by changing the frequency of cathode ray tubes. This was very interesting to me and was all put together very quickly which was very impressive.
Cathode Ray Tube presentation