This week, all the ORCHID PhD Students got together in Southampton for a 2 day conference and hackfest. Day 1 involved a number of talks about research in industry, robotics, blogs, inference, and visual frameworks. We also heard about how to write CVs, postgraduate life (without the rose tinted glasses), internships, how to get your research into the media, and communicating with purpose (which sparked a heated discussion over dinner about whether drivers and passengers adequately represented the diversity of people types…). Day 2 was packed with trailing wires, people performing weird hand gestures in front of motion detecting devices, and a large group of us trying to connect 3 devices together over Z-wave (It all depends whether its in P mode, C mode, Ll mode, or E mode…don’t ask, I’m still recovering…). Eventually we managed to hack together a website, an android app used to incentivise users to turn their heating down, some optimisation of thermostat set points using GPs, some motion sensor input to increase or decrease the heating, and wireless communication with a thermostat using raspberry Pis. Here’s a link to some photos from the day: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ajzrcvn9fhmaxaz/SX_T-0-r8x
I thoroughly enjoyed the two day event and hope that everyone involved got something out of it! I’m especially looking forward to the next hackfest!