August 7, 2016, Cyberjaya – JomHack: Smart Cities with LoRa, is a 24 hour IoT Hackathon (which starts on 5th August and ends on 7th August), in collaboration with MDEC, Cyberview, and The Things Network. The purpose of this Hackathon is to enable participants to develop usable IoT solutions based on LoRa technology, which can be adopted, and implemented by Smart Cities nationwide.
As one of the judges for the first round, we are divided into three groups and evaluated about 10 Teams each before some of them were selected to the Final Rounds. Some of the teams put in extra effort using their sensors. In fact, teams that have done their homework with great props and even a fuzzy algorithm.
The 10 Finalists presented their projects
- Traffic Management Using Fuzzy Logic
- Smart Parking
- Ambulance Express
- Public Toilet Warning & Location
- Vehicle early warning system
- Pipe Water leakage
- Water Tank – level and quality
- Crowdsourcing environmental data
- One button Emergency System
- Home emergency button
What impressed me was the ability for the some of the teams to complete the integration of their LoRa end points with the Gateway and create mobile applications including beautifully crafted visualization dashboard. Although personally, I felt that the business case is still weak over time it can be improved into a better product.
Congratulations to MDEC, Cyberview and The Things Network as the leading IOT Ecosystem Partners that organized this event. Great beginning for the journey in building Malaysia IoT ecosystem that is still lacking within the country. Here’re four (4) main points which would significantly impact the industry:
- Building Ideas – Jomhack provides limited sensors, but when a person was confined to a particular boundary, sometimes it can produce amazing ideas. But when you allow them to bring more sensors, it opens up to many possibilities. We should let ideas to flow freely – a solution that might look “silly” today can be a breakthrough tomorrow.
- Building Competencies – It’s rare to see people with skills that cover from hardware, embedded programming, communications protocol, the web or mobile applications development and business acumen.
- Building Momentum – The IoT journey starts with a single step. The efforts should be continuous throughout Malaysia. Creating awareness, interests, and transformation are unending quests and should be supported by the Government and industries.
- Building IoT Ecosystem – It brings together several industry players with the “hackers”. You never know maybe it attracts the attention of these industry players to bring or advise the “hackers” to bring their “prototypes” to the next level. Sometimes, exchanging ideas and business cards worth more than the three days spent at the hackathon.
Good job! Hope to see more in the future!
About the Author
Dr. Mazlan Abbas is the CEO of REDtone IOT. He can be reached at mazlan.abbas@redtone.com . You can follow him on LinkedIn at https://my.linkedin.com/in/mazlan/ or Twitter at http://twitter.com/mazlan_abbas . For further details, check out http://about.me/mazlan.abbas
