Häcks on the Beach
3 September 2019, by Björn Schmidt
Photo: UHH/A. Mentz
At the weekend, the "Häcks on the Beach" workshop with subsequent exhibition in Café Entenwerder 1 was held on stage or pontoon. Even a celebrity was there! Udo Lindenberg happened to be a guest in the café during the exhibition.
On Friday, 30.08.2019 the hackathon "Häcks on the Beach" started at the CSTI at Steindamm 94. About 30 participants from the UHH, TUHH, HAW, HCU and the University of Music and Theatre arrived at 10 am for the start in the Creative Space of HAW. The event was organized by the Network of Labs of the Hamburg universities as part of the ahoi.digital computer science platform. After a short introduction round, ideas on the topic of sensors were collected in a brainstorming session. After group identification, the participants immediately started to implement their ideas in exhibits/prototypes. They tinkered, soldered and programmed until late into the night.
The next morning, the projects were continued from 10 a.m. in Café Entenwerder 1. Work could continue in peace and quiet on a pontoon rented especially for the event. After the participants had been supplied with pizza, the groups set out in the afternoon to set up their exhibits/prototypes directly in the café. From 4 p.m. the exhibition started with the following projects:
Gloves equipped with pressure-sensitive sensors. As soon as the sensor was triggered by a handshake, a computer-generated voice said: "Say hi to me, please" to interact with people. Udo Lindenberg also had the opportunity to test the glove in action.
With the project THE ELBE a video installation was presented. For this purpose, an avatar for the Elbe was visualized on a large screen, which was generated from environmental data.
In the Control Room all environmental data collected by our sensors, such as temperature, air pressure, humidity were clearly displayed on a dashboard especially developed for the event.
In addition, a group set up an active LoRaWAN network, which connected both sides of the Elbe River with the TU's LoRa server and was able to integrate other sensor nodes.
Another project with participants from the University of Music and Drama and the HAW took place at 7 pm in the form of a concert. First, Vlatko Kucan, lecturer at the HfMT and leader of the SPIIC Ensemble, played a saxophone concert. The saxophone was connected to sensors that registered the key openings and sent the signals to a synthesizer and a trigger system. In this way, very interesting sound worlds were created. Later, two students of the HfMT joined the saxophone with their instruments (violin: Pedro and Dan Bau: Tam). The concert was enthusiastically received by the audience in the café and rewarded with a lot of applause.
In addition, two completed research and teaching projects were exhibited. The conception of a soundmap of loud and quiet places along the Elbe and the fine dust mask by J. Broscheit as well as the underwater vehicle of the group from the TUHH under the direction of C. Renner.
Around 10 pm the event slowly came to an end and the participants and exhibition visitors went home with many new impressions.