During the Bath Hackathon of ’24 I lead a team of computer engineers to build a data acquisition and analysis system. It gathered radio communication data via sensors that we distributed around the university campus. This data was analysed in the AWS cloud to extract occupancy information for specific study spots. The results were presented to students as an interactive campus heatmap, showing which study spots were busier or quieter. Additionally, users could access noise and temperature data for specific locations, enhancing their ability to choose the ideal study spot.

Coding for 24 hours straight is tough, so to keep everyone motivated, I divided the team based on their interests and expertise, allowing them to work on areas they were eager to learn about or had experience in. With experience in embedded systems and cloud computing, I contributed to both while also helping my teammates get up to speed with these technologies. The key to this project was the sensors intercepting radio communications — small microcontrollers equipped with antennas. I had uncovered a method for achieving this several months earlier while working on another project involving microcontrollers and radio communications. I implemented this technique in C++. The data processing on the cloud was processed by a mixture of JavaScript and Python code.

Pitching & Presenting

After 24 hours of coding fuelled by free energy drinks, the prototype system was done. Now it was time to pitch this system to the judges, who were representatives from sponsoring companies like ARM, NXP, GitHub, and more. Students also gathered around to listen, intrigued by the idea. I lead the pitching, telling judges the story of Campus Compass – why it is useful and how we implemented it – while also involving my team mates who could add-on to the pitch and talk about their valuable inputs for various system aspects.

Award Presentation

We felt the pitching went really well, people were engaged and we answered their questions confidently. However, there were hundreds of talented people at the competition, so the win was definitely not guaranteed. We waited anxiously in the massive lecture hall to hear the results. “And now, presented by ARM, the award for the Most Technically Impressive goes to…”

Physda Labs

We are working with the university to develop the technology and sell it to them when we release it later this year. We are also working on a seperate project to Campus Compass, it will utilise web crawling, data analysis, and LLMs in the financial sector. So far we have raised £3,500 of funding.