More than 250 engineers, software developers, designers, marketers and business developers were competing at the Hacker Games hackathon at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) Santaka Valley last weekend. It was the first Hacker Games hackathon with a designated hardware track and the largest event of a kind in Lithuania over the past few years.
Startup Lithuania partnered with KTU Startup Space to hold the third Hacker Games event at the inspiring Santaka Valley of KTU. More than 350 people applied for the event and more than 250 actually turned up. This made Hacker Games in Kaunas the biggest hackathon in Lithuania in the recent years, according to unofficial calculations.
For the first time in Lithuania, the Hacker Games hackathon had a separate Hardware Track (powered by Green Garage) where 14 teams were competing and 10 projects were presented for the jury. The Game Track by Game Insight was the most numerous one with 20 projects (18 of them presented), while the Software Track (powered by Startup Highway) had 16 entries with 14 of them being pitched at the finals.
Three KTU teams were highly successful in the Hardware Track. The team CleverFrost made up from mainly students from Electrical and Electronics Engineering Faculty designed a device that monitors the temperature of drinks inside a fridge and notifies a user via wifi/web app/mobile app when the desired temperature is reached.
Spynukas – the team from KTU’s Biomedical Engineering Institute created a light-sensor based device that monitors the status of a lock and notifies a user if he forgets to lock it. And the KTU’s Cloax team made an automatic cloakroom, which can be opened and closed with a PIN code.
The three teams were awarded prizes from the sponsors of the event: CleverFrost team was awarded with the Electronics Lab Kit from Green Garage. 1000 EUR in cash from Kaunas University of Technology was awarded to two teams: Spynukas and the Open Greenhouse. Kaunas Science and Technology Park awarded 200 EUR to the Cloax team.
The next Hacker Games are scheduled for the end of May in Vilnius. It will go coastal at the end of September in Klaipėda and then back to Vilnius for the end of November.
