Dublin Hardware Hackathon Starts at DCU Innovation Academy

A version of this article originally appeared on http://sarahpaddleswim.wordpress.com

Simon Cocking specialises in covering Dublin tech / start up / innovation events. You can find him on Twitter @SimonCocking 

The pitches have been made, the teams have been chosen. People are seeing if their ideas have enough sustenance to last the weekend.

Members of the support team flew in from San Francisco and Hong Kong to provide expert knowledge from supporting other hardware start ups. Participants had flown in from Germany, UK and other parts of Europe. No wonder it had sold out. This is the first one to be held in Ireland, and even the organisers had wondered what the response would be. Would an Irish based audience be as willing to come forward and pitch their ideas?

Fortunately by the end of the pitches there were 20 to chose from. Plenty of scope to find one they liked, from helping a wheelchair bound techie to have some fun getting his Go Kart to respond to mouth based commands, to wearable motion sensors for Irish livestock.

By Sunday, successful teams will have developed prototypes to demonstrate their MVP’s (minimum viable products). This is the second one held by PCH after an initial one in San Francisco. They were unsure what to expect from the first one, but were blown away by participants levels of energy and enthusiasm, showing up at 8am on the Saturday morning to continue day 2 of the  Hackathon.

Starter packs are provided to all team members by Intel, including Arduino sensor kits and enough cool, useful things to make something really interesting. LayberLabz, Shimmer and BlueBridge Technologies among others were also providing their help and expertise.

After the first event they also made a few tweaks including have a whole series of support people to assist people in using the various technology on offer, including flying over members of Highway 1, a hardware start up mentoring company from San Francisco. http://highway1.io/ Led by Ryan Vinyard @highway1io , to assist participants. 

How will it go in Dublin? We shall see. What will they produce? All will be revealed on Sunday evening at 5pm!