Kerbspace
My second hackathon was in central London, and was run by a subset of Ford Mobility and the overall task was to create an application that used their brand new Kerbspace API. For us (team Solent) went in with high spirits, and a Red Bull™ sponsorship - hence our creation of the "Tower of Red Bull". Upon arrival, our main idea was to create an application that would used facial recognition to detect the users of the app when driving, and then find the perfect place to park - based on their preferences - by using the Kerbspace API. Development started off slowly as we had to learn how the API worked, and what it could do on our own, which was rather a big struggle for us, as we essentially had to learn it from the ground up, without any knowledge of what it could do or how to do it.
With gaining a basic understanding of the API, we were able to create a prototype which filtered the response from the API with the service written in Python to form a rudimentary server, the data was then provided to a local application, that rendered the location data for an augmented reality view for the user to view in a mobile viewport. With this basic working prototype application, we then went off to present what we have done. However, when presenting we was plagued with issues such as: facial recognition failure, and hardware failure; I fear that it could be said that we struggled from our own success. Hence resulting, in us not winning this competition, but we left with a spring in our step, and set off back to Southampton.