many of my accomplishments spawn as a result of the combinations of two personality traits: my thirst to solidify my competance and my brash tendency towards impulsive actions. feelings that i am lacking in some aspect makes me immediately lunge for the closest thing that can perhaps fill that negative space, and the 2024 idea hacks competition held at ucla was one of those opportunities.
my total skillset as of entering the competition consisted of elementary arduino coding and connecting hardware to said arduino, which also happens to be my greatest asset. like the elon musk carbon removal competition, i joined it for the purpose of adding something to my then meager list of experiences. when the day finally came, i walked into ackerman ballroom and was greeted by volunteers who took my name and let me in. funnily enough, i was thinking of applying to be a volunteer, but would it really help my resume as much as participating in it?
looking around, i realized that something made things quite inconvenient: i did not have a team. other participants aggregated by their groupings, perhaps made days or perhaps weeks in advance of the competition. i did run into two other people who didn't have teams, but they both ended up joining teams of 6 or 8, whatever it was it was larger than my group. when i thought i would be doing this on my own, i ran into three people who would become my teammates for the next 3 days. my team consisted of the following:
our first task was the create a page to document our creation. thinking of what we wanted to create was the first obstable, as we were only 4 people with relatively elementary abilities and only so much can be accomplished in the 36 hours we had. we settled with a running game, kind of like a garmin but with a game aspect that depends on the runner's heart rate. we only had a few minutes to complete our page, so we ended up with whatever this is. as you can see, the page was put together in less time than it takes to order food. from that point on, it was time to start on our creation.
we sat down in a circular table somewhere in the middle-back of the ballroom, sandwiched by the teams of the two people i knew who i was about to team up with. the team behind us looked like the seal team six from captain phillips or the 2016 cleveland cavaliers; they had 6-ish people, with two people dedicated to creating an ai model from scratch with pytorch or something and the one person i knew working on 3d modelling, which she apparently does for fun. my heart dropped when i saw they brought in their own 3d printer, with a roll of filament and everything. it shook me to learn i was competing against people who can make the skynet from terminator in a weekend or synthesize a glock 15 out of plastic if they wanted to, while the milestone for me and my team was to get the heart rate scanner below to work.
a different colored led would light up depending on the heart rate, and supposedly the heart rate should also dictate the story being told. the latter portion proved to be challenging to run reliably, therefore we stuck to using buttons to toggle the story. we built it all on an arduino with an extension shield and the only components we used were buttons, leds, resistors, a heart rate monitor, an amplifier circuit to drive the speaker, and a 9v battery. ayah and katharine worked tirelessly on creating a compelling and slightly terrifying story to accompany our device while i assembled the hardware and michael wrote code. we still needed a box to store it in, so either ayah or katharine went to their dorm to get a wooden box. a slit was cut into the box to access the buttons and the box was covered in foam for a crispy matte black finish.
the buttons had a problem, however, that was the height was way below the box slit, therefore we used literal buttons to extend it to a usable height. buttons meaning the ones you use for a cardigan or pants. the button function also had a serious problem that took a long time to figure out that was the actuation time and order. in order for the story to progress, the button had to be pressed an held for around 1.5 seconds with a 0.5 second margin of error. there was a small light on the arduino that would blink blue, however the timing of the blinking and the button press had to be done precisely. i trained myself to perfect that button press duration for around an hour, therefore i was the one to present its functionality.
i still remember the night before the last day. i stayed up until around 2 or 3 working on getting the device to function properly and ended up sleeping in an ackerman meeting room table. it was cold that night and it didn't help that the tables circulated air underneath and were laminated with veneer. there were people from other universities in sleeping bags, but i was sleeping with my jacket as a pillow curled up on a table. i woke up at around 6 or 7 to continue working on the project, and surprisingly lots of people were up working on their projects as well. for those last couple of days i was surviving off yerba mate, nutritionless snacks, a sandwich, and a bowl of panda express, and i was itching for the competition to end. i thought the judges didn't like our pitch, so i was surprised when we were called up to do the final presentation on stage. right before we were called up on stage, however, the device acted jittery and straight up did not work. i was terrified at the prospect of it not working when we got on stage, so me and the team quickly got a new battery, went outside, and uploaded the code into the arduino. finally, it was time for the presentation.
michael turned on his inner steve jobs and explained how using this device was better than using your phone while i ran in place with the heart rate monitor on my finger. i was able to time all the button presses perfectly and the story went along exactly how we wanted it to. in the end, we managed to win the 'go touch grass' track to my infinite surprise. the main thing that bothered me about winning it however was that i could not go to church that day since the presentations ended at 12, so making me skip church for what i think was the first time in la. at least i got a blanket, hammock, and hydroflask out of it.