Following last week’s hackathon at Hack the Midlands, this last weekend I went to Aston Hack.

All my friends told me I was crazy for trying to do two in a row. Early in the week, I laughed and said I’d be super prepared for it. But as the week continued, and I continued to just feel tired, I became slighly less confident that I’d be alive by the end of it.

Despite all that worry, it was a fantasic weekend, and I wouldn’t have spend it any differently. It was quite a bit smaller than Hack the Midlands, and much more student oriented, especially since it was hosted at Aston university. That meant there were fewer sponsors and fewer people to interact with, but it did mean that it felt more personal and connected than at the larger Hack the Midlands.

After getting there and getting a table setup for the team, we wandered around the sponsors tables, looking for any interesting APIs or toolkits that we could incorporate into our hack. Unfortunately, no one had anything that immediately stood out (and we weren’t about to try getting a domain.com address after completely failing to do so last time). So we settled on building something not at all related to any of the sponsors.

What we eventually decided to build was a virtual theremin in the browser, controlled by the Nintendo Switch joycons. I worked on building the audio synthesis side of things, while another member worked on building the interface, and another worked on getting inputs.

What we hadn’t realized before starting is that getting the motion sensors into the browser was going to be much harder than originally expected. While there is a Gamepad API in browsers, it does not have any way to access motion sensors. Additionally, many drivers that support the joycons on computers do not have any support for motion control. So the only correct way forwards, was to modify one of the existing drivers (here) to instead output motion sensor data instead of the joystick data (naturally).

We finally got everything working and had an incredible demo to show off at the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGMdvvvoX68

We all loved our project and had a great time building it. While building it, we had quite a few people stop by and ask what we were up to. We explained it, always having a quick demonstration and explanation - what we didn’t realize was that many of these people were judges. We somehow managed to convince enough of them that our project was awesome, and as a result won best hack of the weekend.

I feel that this last hackathon went much more smoothly than my last one, now that I know how everything works, how to pace yourself and how to make sure you have a good time. I even got a chance to sleep :)

If you’re interested in looking at our project yourself, you can find it on github here.