I was both nervous and excited as I travelled to my first “Hack” in Slapton. Nervous because I had very little idea what a hack was or what happens at one.
I discovered it was an event where lots of people interested in software and hardware development get together and try to solve some problems purely for the fun of solving said problem.
So after a morning of introductions and idea generating we organised ourselves into groups and set about developing. I became an honoury member of a group named FLAIR, and after some initial input the rest of the group set about developing the software to create an all singing all dancing data controlling uploading presenting app named Flair. In a day the team got it working and it was storing data (offline) sending that to a central source, whilst drawing river profiles. there is a web-based prototype you can view.
http://flair-stevenday.rhcloud.com/static/index.html#homePage
All in all I very much enjoyed my first ever Hack, and Slapton. There were some other very exciting ideas (personal favourite was the iPad extension to turn it into a bat detector for under £5)
Cheers Joe
