A huge part of Metal Toad culture is experimentation - and our bi-annual hackathons help to unleash our creativity. From video streaming, to AR/VR, to IoT and more - may this list of hackathon articles inspire you!
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3 Ways To Use Machine Learning: December 2021 Hackathon Overview
At the end of 2021, Metal Toad leaders came together to reevaluate the future of Metal Toad. After several internal meetings, it was decided that Metal Toad's future is with machine learning. The main driver in this decision is that machine learning is on the rise.
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Q4 2021 Online Hackathon: Identifying Downed Power Lines
In Februar
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Announcing The Metal Toad Q4 2021 Online Hackathon: Building Your Own Machine Learning Model
It's that magical time of the year - our hackathon is back! Twice a year, we set aside the day-to-day and dive into an exciting 48-hour innovation whirlwind of rapid development. It's a chance to play on the leading edge of cloud technology, and we have a lot of fun doing it.
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Running FaaS on Linux Mint 19.3 with Kubeless
FaaS, the acronym for Function as a Service, is a cloud computing service that allows developers to build, run, and manage applications as functions without having to maintain their own infrastructure.
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Kubeless: Role your own FaaS
All major cloud offerings have a Function as a Service (FaaS) tool. AWS offers Lambda, Azure offers Functions, GCP offers Cloud Functions.
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Live Stream From Drone To AWS With S3 Backup
Drones are awesome, and a lot of fun. But what happens if your drone gets lost along with all its footage? Or, what if you want other people around the world to be able to tune in to what the drone sees — in real time — as it sees it?
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Remote live streaming to AWS Media Services from a DJI Spark drone
I’m Vaughn Hawk, a Cloud Engineer for Metal Toad for over 3 years.
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Hackathon Collaboration with Live Share on Visual Studio
One of the challenges of participating remotely in a Hackathon is the ability to cooperate with your team in anything like being there in person. No looking over someone's shoulder. No borrowing the keyboard to fill in a bit of code while the other person looks up something.
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Metal Toad Hackathon - A unique (non-technical) experience
Have you ever felt happy, nervous, motivated and excited in just 48 hours? If your answer is no you have never participated in a hackathon before!
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Metal Toad’s AWS Media Services Hackathon
This is an exciting week at Metal Toad—it’s hackathon time! Twice a year, the Toads devote two full days to rapid innovation, and it’s always a blast.
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Creating a Scavenger Hunt on Android With TensorFlow
Prior to Google IO 2017, I would have expected creating an image classifier that functions on an Android device to either not work, be terribly slow, or be completely inaccurate. Fortunately, with the current Machine Learning offerings from Google, including TensorFlow, none of these are true assuming you take some care into putting everything together.
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How to Run a Great Hackathon (and Why You Should Do It)
Working at Metal Toad is all about innovation. It’s why I was drawn to this place—a place that celebrates the unusual, gets excited about new ideas, and constantly seeks out the latest emerging tech.
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Web-based AR: Hunting for Treasure with A-Frame
When Metal Toad announced the theme of the winter Hackathon would be Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), those of us who have focused our careers on building websites faced a conundrum: how can we learn the principles of AR/VR in
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An Exploration of Daydream Using the Android SDK
Going into the latest hackathon, I knew there were several options for building a virtual reality (VR) app for Android devices. Google currently has two platforms for VR available: Cardboard and Daydream, not to be confused with the screensaver mode on Android phones.
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Team Knock-Knock Answers the “Who’s There?” Question With AR
Metal Toad’s winter 2018 hackathon was all about Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (VR and AR).
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Winter Hackathon 2018: Hacking History
A few years ago, I had the good fortune to travel to London to visit some friends. But before I talk about my trip, there is something you must know about me.
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"Hack the Plants" — Five Lessons Learned from an IoT Adventure
Do a search on “IoT projects” and you’ll turn up endless pages of fantastic Internet of Things ideas and examples. Roll-your-own home security system! Track your cat’s movement! Build your own droid!
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Hackathon 2018: Four Guys in a Garage. On Laptops. In a Minivan.
This year’s hackathon was all about the Internet of Things (IoT)—pulling data from the real world and sending it to the cloud, then finding ways to analyze and manipulate that data for insights.
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Hackathon: Team Mood Meter
This year’s hackathon challenge was to explore the Internet of Things (IoT) using cloud technology. As a Scrum Master, I have a longstanding interest in supporting the emotional wellbeing of teams, because it’s an important element of productivity that often gets overlooked.
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Freedom to Fumble: Learnings From Hackathon 2018
I spend all my time at work dealing with software. So going into this year’s hackathon, I was excited to get hands-on (and in over my head) with hardware. Having never even touched a Raspberry Pi before, I was in for an interesting couple of days!
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Hackathon 2018: Kegerator 2—Revenge of the Flowmeter
If you’re going to spend two long days frying a Raspberry Pi and fiddling with (very) finicky electronics, is there any better way to do it than surrounded by beer?
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Q4 Hackathon Theme: Machine Learning & Data Science
I was dusting off my copy of Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines today, and found a fascinating chart (adapted below).
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IoT Hackathon - Coffeebot with Raspberry Pi
For our latest Hackathon, with the theme being the Internet of things (IoT), my team and I wanted to create a device that would encourage people in the office to keep the coffee pots full of life-giving nectar.
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Q2 Hackathon Theme: Internet of Things (IoT)
Metal Toad's second hackathon will be focused on the Internet of Things. Why IoT? Over the years we have accumulated broad experience in this area; we've built systems including analytics for solar and wind energy, backend services for wearable devices, and a vehicle telematics platform. Of course this is a growing field, and in addition to software and data analytics for IoT, this will be a chance for toads to get their hands dirty with a soldering iron.