On the 2nd weekend of September (Sept. 13-15, 2024), Canada’s biggest hackathon took place at the Engineering 7 Building on campus: Hack the North. This event brings more than 1000 hackers from all across the globe to build their passion projects with other students. Several teams created spectacular projects that led to them being finalists at the event’s main competition. And I really wanted to highlight a few to show just what these hackers are making during those few days.
ConArt AI
Made By: Ryushen Tan, Shireen Rajora, Nikhil Acharya, Ben Russell
To my fellow engineers,
Have you ever gotten stuck in coming up with designs for a product you were planning to make for one of your courses?
Well, look no further than ConArt AI, a gamified design application that assists artists and/or teams with developing new ideas at a faster pace during the beginning phases of your design project.
The way it works is that teams will come together and each individual member will produce a quick sketch and provide a prompt in a certain amount of time. These sketches will transform into actual images and everyone will vote on their team’s design with a Likert-like scale from 1 to 5. The main idea is to allow teams to move from ideas to concepts at a quicker pace, and it also accelerates the creative process of coming up with designs for those with limited time to complete their project.
The frontend of the application was created with React and Tailwind CSS to produce a smooth and functioning interface that ensures collaboration can occur in real time. The backend used Convex in order to control the game logic and handling of states. It also made sure communication existed between the actual team members during the sketching, voting, and scoring portions of the application.
The sketches were turned into full images using a ControlNet model conditioned on human sketches, which adapts Stabile Diffusion for image generation. This model was accessed through Replicate’s ControlNet API, which allowed for easy integration and remote processing of the sketches into fully rendered images. Convex regulates all the API calls which allows for faster updates and feedback loops.
During the development of this, the team ran into some issues. The main one being related to routing in production, where they had to troubleshoot differences between the development and live environments. There also seemed to be problems with making sure the app itself looked well visually across various devices and/or screen sizes. Despite these, the team powered through and managed to make it as one of the finalists of Hack the North this year.
Everyone on the team managed to accomplish something. Whether that was creating a UI/UX design in a short period or finally deploying a project for the first time, each member walked away from this with a well-earned victory and upgraded skills for the future.
PulseGrip
Made By: Aadi Umrani, Samir Sharma, Kevin Dang, Noah Levy
Another project that was developed was a bionic hand assistant called PulseGrip. Its main purpose was to assist patients who were dealing with stroke in terms of re-acquiring finger mobility. In particular, detected signals would set off a motor that would accordingly move the patients of the fingers.
There were various portions that made the device a reality: a hardware portion, a games component, and a dashboard. Various types of hardware were used including an Arduino ESP32 microcontroller to process sensor data and an ECG sensor that would process the signal. A game component was implemented with Unity (in C# programming) to create a more engaging experience for the patient. Lastly, the dashboard’s main task was to monitor the progression of the patient over time.
While developing this project, the team faced various issues. To begin, they initially used EMG sensors to identify signals (due to its stronger functionality) but they unfortunately fried due to a high amount of current flow. This led the group to eventually use ECG sensors which were difficult to use as replacements which are not as great as EMG sensors in signal detection.
Another hurdle was getting their Arduino ESP32 microcontroller to have communication with the games and dashboard components with the use of a websocket API. This was due to the restrictions made with the WiFi network of the building they were in, which limited the device’s ability to be tested fully.
To combat the ECG problem, they had to wire their device in a different arrangement and alter their Arduino code to implement a few signal processing steps, which managed to allow the ECG sensors to have an improved signal detection and there was more consistency in their expected outputs. As for the second issue mentioned, the solution was to get rid of their websockets and use a USB cable for communication purposes between the microcontroller and the games and dashboard.
And the grind to fix those bugs paid off big time.
After three major presentations that prioritized presenting something specific about their project, they were deemed as finalists and ultimately one of the winners of the hackathon.
Aadi Umrani (2T Biomedical) talked about his experience at Hack the North, saying:
“One of the most impressive aspects of the event was seeing high school students with the knowledge and skills to build hardware and games from the ground up. It was both inspiring and humbling to witness them working on advanced projects. I had never tackled such hands-on work until university, and it reminded me how important early exposure to technology and innovation can be.”
Overall, these are some of the great projects being made at Hack the North. Interested in learning more about these? Feel free to check out the links below that talk in detail about the development of these products. And who knows? Maybe you can build the next great thing at next year’s event.
Only time will tell …
ConArt AI
[1] “ConArt AI,” Devpost. Accessed: Oct. 03, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://devpost.com/software/conart-ai
PulseGrip
[2] “PulseGrip – 2024 Finalist,” Devpost. Accessed: Oct. 03, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://devpost.com/software/pulsegrip
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