Microsoft Band Hackathon

Rob wriitng

Yesterday Robert Munnoch and myself headed down to London to take part in a Microsoft Band Hackathon. The event was based at the Central Working resource in Whitechapel, where the Microsoft Accelerator programme stuff is also based.

At the start of the event each team was given a Microsoft Band each and turned loose to make something interesting.  We downloaded the SDK (it's very easy to use) and got cracking.

There were a whole bunch of teams taking part. Robert and I had some plans involving image processing, accelerometer data acquisition and LittleBits cloud connected devices.

Proper Pizza

The event was great fun, and the catering gave me Three Thing Game flashbacks, which was nice.

We had the LittleBits cloud bit talking to the band. We could get readings from the LittleBits circuit to cause notifications, and we were also using the accelerometer in the Band to control the servo output. Which was fun.

Experience has taught me that I can't do all night development any more and so at around midnight on Monday we set off to find the hotel. This took a lot longer than I'd planned. Note to self: Hotels are often remarkably unaware of their actual location and so you should always double check their directions. Otherwise you end up traipsing through the night to the wrong location. Like we did.

Anyhoo,, we found the place in the end and I settled down for what sleep I could get, while Robert gamely carried on writing code. In the end everything worked at the last minute and we had enough stuff to talk about during the final show and tell presentations.

It's very interesting to see what folks are doing with the device and as the capabilities of the Microsoft Band SDK grow in the future things are going to get even more interesting.

Thanks to Dave Baker and Paul Foster of Microsoft for setting up the event. I'm going to post some of the things that I've learned in the next few days.

Oh, and sorry to the Python Wrestlers this evening. In my sleep deprived state I completely forgot a to create slide deck that I was supposed to have written for the event tonight. The good news is that thanks to sterling support from Warren we managed to have quite a good night in the end, reading the weather from RSS feeds.