Another year at the gigantic hackathon that is TechCrunch with Weather Underground. We had a few devs from the API team out to support the hackers that might have questions pop up and help them along. I came out to support the devs with boxes of little electronic bits and we hacked together little things to pass the slow spots as the clock went around the small hours.
The material I designed for last year's TechCrunch is HERE
Taking inventory of what you have is a solid early step in understanding what you have, and finding a route to solutions. Taking inventory of what your competitors have can do it faster. Not a copy paste of course, but a good pattern double check.
The classic is an annual charity golf tournament held in Napa, California to raise funds for the Solano Kids Insurance Program(SKIP). SKIP enables eligible Solano County children to receive health and dental care insurance. These children typically do not qualify for government sponsored programs such as Medi-Cal and come from families who can not afford health insurance for their children. Since 2007, the Classic for Kids Golf Tournament has raised close to two million dollars for this worthwhile cause.
In 2014 the event was recognized for being the sole fund raiser for the Solano Children's Insurance Program, which is credited with taking the county from having the highest rate of uninsured children in the state, to the lowest.
As a reminder of why the work is so important, we were able to have a special guest speaker, a mother who had been touched by the program, and her daughter, who is now in college.
I participated as a member of the conceiving team (This was originally a Solano Magazine project), worked on the identity and collateral, and continue to support with design work and as the event photographer. Busy!
I recently started working with electronics as way to make something real, tangible with programing as a way to learn a little more. Working at Weather Underground I deal a lot with weather so of course one of my first ideas was to make a weather station.
Making something that does the job is never enough, so Amy (my co-conspirator) and I set out to give the little bundle of wires a more entertaining form. Inspired by Adventure Time we settled on a robot body. In addition to housing the controller and sensors, the robot form gave us a good reason to include a large screen that could display data (making the whole thing self contained) and as a bonus, make funny faces.
A quick project to test a few ideas quickly grew and ended up keeping us company at our booth at TechCrunch.
Code is up at: GitHub More construction detail at Hackster.io
