Robohacks 2016

Presentation of Robohacks

This weekend, I attended the first edition of Robohacks. This event was organized by McGill University McGill Robotics. It was a hackathon, but very different from others. We had 24 hours to make a robot. Me and my teammates had no preconceived idea of what we would do during the hackathon before arriving. In talking, we were inspired by “twitch plays pokemon” and decided to create a drone / hovercraft controlled by instant chat twitch. For those who do not know that Twitch is, it is an online video platform broadcast live. The difference with YouTube is that people who are watching the video can chat live with each other.

Since I was in a team with Dronolab, my student club that develops drones, we continued in the universe of drones but we still wanted to do something different. That’s when we thought about making an hovercraft.

Project : an hovercraft

To be fair, I have contributed less to the project than I would have hoped… Unfortunately, I returned home to sleep at night, so it did not help – I had less hours to work with my team on the project. However, I never had the oportunity to program something to operate a small drone beside me. It was an extraordinary experience which I will remember. I still learned a lot during the day and hopes to participate in the 2017 edition being more ready for what will expect. I will also have more knowledge in 1 year!

The hovercraft was working with Twitch. To put it in hovercraft mode, we should simply write “Forward” on the instant discussion. To replace drone position, it was enough for us to write “jump”. We had planned other functions such as “left” and “right” … Unfortunately, we ran out of batteries a few hours before the hackathon ended which prevented us to test these functions and make them fully functional.

Demonstration

Find this project

The code on Github is private for now. By cons, it is on DevPost !

Pictures

Robohacks 2016