<em>Hack4India</em>, a hardware hackathon with the theme ‘Internet Of Things’, was jointly organized by Texas Instruments Centre for Embedded Product Design (TI-CEPD) and NSIT. The event was primarily organized to encourage budding entrepreneurs, and witnessed tremendous participation, not only from Delhi, but from all over India. Teams from various IITs, IPU, JRE School of Institutions, JUIT, NSIT and even Harvard University actively participated in this 3 day event.
<a href=”http://alliancensit.com/hack4india-hardware-hackathon/b8m1vrvciaeh7ll/” rel=”attachment wp-att-2919″><img class=”size-medium wp-image-2919″ src=”http://alliancensit.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/B8m1vrvCIAEh7LL-300×169.jpg” alt=”Lighting of the lamp” width=”300″ height=”169″ /></a> Lighting of the lamp
Professor Dhananjay Gadre, along with some special guests from <em>Tata Power-DDL</em>, <em>Agnitio</em> and <em>Texas Instruments</em>, declared the event open with the ceremonial lighting on an electronic Wisdom lamp, developed in the lab of Prof. Gadre. The organizers were informed that the college premises will be in lock-down by the National Security Guard for the next 4 days, due to a rally by the Prime Minister of India, Mr. Narendra Modi. Hence, the hackathon, along with the requisite equipment and logistics, was shifted from Dwarka to 91 Springboards, Gurgaon, in the span of a single day.
The event was sponsored by Tata Power and Agnitio Technologies, both of whom provided a set of challenges for the participating teams to solve. Tata Power Delhi Distribution Ltd offered challenges like detection of faulty transmission lines, detection of theft of electricity, etc. Agnitio Technology, a company offering Smart Meter equipment, presented challenges like detection and logging of various kinds of tampers on meters.
The second day saw a session by an international lawyer, Rahul Dev, on Intellectual Property Rights. Mr. Sidharth Bhansali, a techie and management graduate from Indian School of Business, and Sunil Goyal, a mobile domain specialist, also joined in and guided the participants with their prototypes. LBD Makers, a firm offering 3D designing and prototyping services, prototyped the concepts of the participants and also organized 3-D printing workshops on the same day. Day 2 ended with “The Surprise of the day” which was an ‘AVR Butterfly’ for all the participants!
Mr. Arpit Chabbra, co-founder of Sagacious Research, Sparrow devices and Ad Box, began the proceedings on the final day with his lecture. Soon, it was time for the pitching session, which would ultimately result in one of the teams taking away a whopping INR 1 Lacs. The panel of judges consisted of Anuj Pulsatya, an angel investor, Rajeev Aggarwal, a serial entrepreneur, Lomesh Dutta, a serial entrepreneur and Rajesh Pathak, technical head of Agnitio.
In the hours that followed, the various participating teams pitched their ideas with their prototypes. The mind-boggling ideas ranged from helping the visually impaired to checking one’s vitals on the go, with the aid of smart phones. The objective of every participant was to help the society in one way or the other, that too at minimum cost. As soon as the last team had pitched, the results were announced.
Nikhilesh, Mritunjai and Rohan from NSIT secured the 1st position with their prototype of “low cost Smart Meter”, which optimises power usage, prevents energy theft and tampering of energy meters. Ayan Pahwa, Aman Deep Singh and Akshay Kumar from JRE school of Institutions got the 2nd prize for their prototype “Easy Exit”, a device which ensures security of the house using cloud gateways. The 3rd prize went to Himanshu Bablani for his fantastic idea “Lab on cloud” which basically puts a science lab on the cloud.
The judges lauded the efforts of all the participants. Soon, it was also announced by the organizers that a meeting with the name ‘Hack4India’ would be organized on the 2nd Saturday of every month to bolster the spirit of entrepreneurship in each of us. The event was a huge success and tremendously inspired the young inventors to pursue the path of entrepreneurship.