Informatics students gearing up for the first student-run hardware hackathon
CreatED is the UK’s first student-run hardware hackathon. A hackathon is a 24 hour event where coders, makers and technical people of all kinds come together and build something innovative.
The twist with CreatED is that instead of focusing on just software that runs on computers, the organisers are including hardware, which means lots of embedded devices, IoT applications and robotics.
The CreatED hackathon takes place on 7th and 8th April 2018 (9AM Saturday - 5PM Sunday). It is open to everyone over the age of 18, but it helps to have some interest in programming or electronics. As many as 100 attendees will take part.
The focus is just build something to be proud of that uses a hardware component. The organisers are encouraging beginners to attend as it’s a great environment to learn things in, but if attendees have programmed or tinkered with electronics before then that will help them out.
The hack is being organised by the University of Edinburgh Embedded and Robotics Society (EaRS). They have been involved in organising IoT Challenge this year, which is a yearly event run in association with Information Services and the School of Informatics. It was a much smaller event, only featuring 20 attendees, but they received lots of positive feedback from participants in terms of how much they learned and how much they enjoyed the event.
We’ve attended lots of hackathons in the past, and it’s great to give something back to the community. Personally I’m quite proud to be the first event of our kind in the UK as this is something I’d like to see more of.
Our main goal is for people to be proud of what they’ve built and what they’ve learned over the course of the weekend. As a committee we love hackathons and the satisfaction for us comes from bringing an event like this to the community.
If the event goes well they hope to make this an annual occurrence.