

Hacks from PennApps, largest student-run hackathon - ananddass
http://blog.filepicker.io/post/31883045359/interesting-hacks-from-pennapps-the-largest

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habosa
PennApps was awesome this year! I had never done a Hackathon before and now I
want to do another one ASAP.

I definitely saw some amazing hacks that didn't get prizes. Someone made a
robotic bartender using Arduino that had an iPad app that would let you choose
drinks. It could mix from 16 ingredients and accept payments from Venmo. The
best part is that team didn't bring the hardware to the event (minus the Uno
board), they spent 24 of the 48 hours scrambling around Philly buying things
(they're from Michigan). That's true hacking spirit.

I made PokeBattle, it's just a silly little hack but if you're interested
check it out at <http://pokebattle.herokuapp.com> (I'm not even sure if there
are directions for use or what it is, we were rushed for the demo).

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vitno
I was a hacker there. I actually think some of the coolest projects went
totally unnoticed. My personal favorite was <http://www.bbcat.co/>, which some
Rutgers people made. There were also some pretty sweet hardware ones out
there. Some guys used electrodes attached to a person to play that google
doodle running game.

I really thought the ones that won were pretty sensationalist and not
particularly complex.

(they also needed to feed us better. Some dark rooms would have been nice
too...)

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brettcvz
Ha I loved bbcat! 21st century tomagachi. That was another one of the really
polished designs that stood out - couldn't remember the name

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zan2434
I, too, was a hacker there. PennApps this year was definitely a great time,
but the judging didn't really align well with the quality of apps. One of the
most popular apps, PayTango, had a completely faked demo from what I saw (I
saw the play button show up when they tapped a button on the iPad, revealing
that it was just an image slideshow of mockups). That and the demo time was
severely truncated, 75 seconds is enough to demo about one feature, and when
your app has several features it's impossible to show it all. The press didn't
even cover some of the coolest hacks in my opinion, like
<http://pokebattle.herokuapp.com> , <http://bbcat.co> ,
<http://electioneering.us> , and <http://notableapp.herokuapp.com> , and some
more I can't recall. I understand that it's hard for them to deal with so many
participants though (it was may more than they had planned), so I applaud them
for their effort and expect them to improve their plans accordingly for the
spring event, which will definitely be just as popular if not more-so.

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gailees
I definitely felt like the judging was rushed; given the pinch on time, I
liked a lot of their choices though. Do you know if J.A.M. actually even
worked? I really liked where they were going, but it didn't look like the app
actually worked even close to as well as the other music transcribers out
there, so I was pretty surprised when they won. Although I definitely thought
they were moving in a cool direction, I don't know how the judges could tell
if their app actually worked or not at all.

Loved <http://snapsite.me> !

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zan2434
haha I decompiled their jar the other day actually, and they basically just
combined abc4j with the YIN method of finding fundamental frequency for sound
and, a table between frequencies and notes. I doubt it works nearly as well as
most alternatives, because they made no provisions for noise in the signal or
other complications. Very simple implementation even by hackathon standards,
but it was presented like magic so I'm not surprised they wowed the judges.
One of the team members even said this though "We just used Java, which is
really basic programing. We didn’t even use fancy web app stuff, which is why
we didn’t expect this at all. I don’t even know what to say about this" -theDP

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uams
<http://snapsite.me/> is pretty cool. It takes a Facebook Page and makes a
professional looking webpage out of it.

e.g. <https://www.facebook.com/TheEconomist> to
<http://www.snapsite.me/home.php?id=804>

It helps less tech savvy businesses only know how to operate a facebook page
have a decent web presence.

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BinRoo
Our team made Batt Signal [https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/pennapps-
fall-2012/h...](https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/pennapps-
fall-2012/hacks/batt-signal)

Allows you to notify your friends when your battery drops low.

We got Zynga’s award for Bay Area Favorite :)

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dmansen
Hey Brett! Nice post. I had a BLAST mentoring at PennApps - these kids could
teach everybody a lot about enthusiasm and hard work. It's always inspiring
when you have so many great minds in one place.

Look for my post about it as well, coming soon..

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sumrania
I really liked Dashdisco: <http://dashdis.co/> Making music by coding can be a
new way to teach an amateur how to code well. This app has so much potential!

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gailees
We for sure had a ton of fun making <http://buddyhack.com> and it was a crazy
adventure right before our demo to pivot to <http://hackmyfacebook.com>

The filepicker.io guy was an awesome mentor, along with many of the other
mentors that were there(Rob from Twilio!).

Super awesome experience; Michigan Hackers looks forward to coming back with
even more hackers in January(We rallied 20 hackers to go less than a week
before the event).

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tomatohs
There is a full listing of hacks here:
[https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/pennapps-
fall-2012/h...](https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/pennapps-
fall-2012/hacks)

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mencius1108
this is great. impressive hacks out there and crazy to see what college
students can build in a short amount of time. <http://www.snapsite.me> is a
pretty cool concept definitely commercializable.

