This past week, Ingenu hosted a company-sponsored hackathon, “The RPMA Omegathon and Wizard Battle”, to promote the development of consumer-oriented RPMA (Random Phase Multiple Access) applications and encourage its employees to experiment with the technology. Five Ingenu teams participated and all came up with very different, creative applications utilizing our technology. The winning team, Team OnGuard, came away with the grand prize as well as a great learning experience on building an application—all without starting any fires!

Here is what Varun Sood, Ingenu employee and member of Team OnGuard, had to say about his team’s experience:

What did you make? Our team made a home/fence security device that detects intruders and sends an alert to a mobile device using RPMA.

How did you make it? We made it by using a light source/laser in line of sight with a photo-resistor. When the link is broken between these two devices, the voltage is pulled high and this triggers an alarm SDU to be sent by rACM (Reference Application Communication Module) over RPMA and we use an app to pull the data off of the REST (Representational State Transfer) interface where the node is connected. We configured the Digital Input pin on the rACM board to send an alarm when voltage is high (edge triggered).

When brainstorming what application to create, what made you decide on doing this? My team and I were discussing how to best use the rACM to send alarms and we decided to make this since it would be wouldn’t take too much time and was pretty straight-forward to execute.

What problems will your application solve? It helps where Wi-Fi is not easy to come by. This app enables us to use the attributes of our RPMA technology to provide coverage even in the most remote of areas. Also, this could be viewed as a cheaper option to what is currently available in the market.

Have you participated in a hackathon before or have any experience building applications? No, this was my first time.

After creating your own application, what advice would you give to first-time app developers? To play around as much as possible and not be afraid of blowing things up.

What was your favorite part of participating in this hackathon? I got to experience some very cool applications that were showcased as part of the hackathon.

Congratulations to Varun and his team, (Siddhartha Agrawal, Will Nordgren, and Jignesh Patel) for winning our first company-sponsored hackathon!