Posted by Jeff Kauppila on Tuesday, April 9, 2013 in Related News.

Original Article Source

While the hackathon trend may be aging, Y Combinator – a well-known Silicon Valley incubator – freshened the concept by hosting a 12-hour “hardware” hackathon in late February at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

More than 130 designers worked on 32 projects. Minardi’s team won an iPad, some Pebble watches, and access to some of Silicon Valley’s top investors.

Minardi had the idea to create a haptic feedback glove to interact with 3-D environments and five strangers who stopped at his table liked the idea, so they formed a team. A series of cables applies pressure to the wearer’s fingers to resist their motion in response to pushing against a virtual object.

The glove’s movements and motions are mapped to a virtual world. Imagine that a person wearing the glove could actually grasp a sword in a video game. Minardi told Tech Crunch he gravitated toward hardware hacking because “I could tell a computer exactly what to do, but I wanted to tell the world what to do.”

The Dayton, Ohio native said he always knew he wanted to be an engineer – like his father. Minardi said, “I chose Vanderbilt because I visited and fell in love [with the campus].”

For his capstone senior design project, Minardi worked on a team to further research on how integrated circuits respond to various types of radiation. Their task was to develop a graphical user interface to provide real-time plots of a running radiation experiment as well as allow electrical control of the devices placed under test. Their senior design project – DeathRay: A GUI program to control and visualize radiation experiments – interfaced with a modular testing platform constructed by Vanderbilt’s Institute for Space and Defense Electronics.

“This might seem pretty far from the VR work,” Minardi said, “but one of my favorite projects during senior year was designing an ankle band containing a series of vibrators that could be set to always vibrate in a certain direction, giving the user a sensory compass.”

The hackathon was run by Upverter, a DEMO-launched company. Upverter gives hardware hackers software for creating, sharing and collaborating around hardware designs.

Upverter co-founder Zak Homuth told VentureBeat via email before the event that he expected hackathon participants to spend most of the hack designing new hardware, adding features to their existing hardware startup products, and most importantly meeting like-minded hackers.

Tags: Alumni, Electrical Engineering, Radiation Effects, Radiation Testing, Senior Design

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