Hackathon

This weekend was the Emory Hackathon-- 32 straight hours of programming and robotics. While I don't have skills in coding, I was convinced to join by one of my more computer-minded friends. It turned out that LEGO Mindstorms were involved in the robotics sector, so I was able to apply my years of playing with LEGOs to something besides building castles and race-cars. We made a good team-- I put together most of the hardware for our robot while my friend wrote the software.

Our project? "I, Sandwich," a machine designed to assemble peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at the press of a LEGO button. The demo video we put together for our final presentation can be found here. There were a few unexpected problems we ran into along the way-- the amount of friction between two slices of whole-grain bread is surprisingly high (place one slice of bread on top of another, then try to move one without moving the other. It's not exactly Jenga.) Our solution involved a system of gears, triggers, and the use of extremely stale bread for all tests.

The premise of the Hackathon was something along the lines of the monkey-typewriter-Shakespeare scenario. Take a hundred or so technically-minded high school and college students, shut them in a building with a bunch of technology and pizza, and you'll get a few gems of engineering. I'm already looking forwards to making I, Sandwich 2 next year. Give a man a sandwich and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to make a machine that makes a sandwich and he'll eat for as long as there's stale enough bread available.