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Engineers, with their vast array of theoretical knowledge are always looking for moments to apply themselves. HackUST2015 was our opportunity to shine. Hackathons in general are a combination of hacking and marathons. However HackUST in particular gave us a euphoric feeling. Working with a team from start to finish in an epic development spree is a rush which one can find nowhere else.

Our team (Efemel) focused on making an attachable module for a pen, which can read the strokes made on a piece of paper and project them in real time on a canvas on a server which can be shown on the website. In addition, we developed an iOS app which can record the strokes made on the touch screen and project on the same browser canvas.

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For the module we hacked the CMOS sensor of a simple optical mouse to get the data. In addition, we used a microcontroller (Arduino Uno) to get the data from the optical sensor and sent them to a computer. The computer in turn sent it to the server. The website which was constantly listening to the server redrew the strokes which were drawn by the pen. Apart from the Arduino programming, we had to program the server side and divided the work to carry out the iOS development as well. To fit the sensor on the pen and to make sure that throughout the function the sensor is parallel to the ground (paper being written on) a grip was manufactured. The grip was modelled on Solidworks and then fabricated using the 3D printer.

We believe that the Hackathon gave all of us a big playground to help practice our knowledge in contributing to make something which was pretty cool. All of us are from different majors and collaborating together was a great experience. We also had a chance to meet some people from the industry who showed interest in our product and gave us valuable advice on how to make it better. We hope to develop our product further in the coming months. The most striking thing we realised was that, on Friday we just had an idea, and on Sunday we had a product.

- Saad Gill(MECH), Chan Kwan Yim(COMP), Farhad Bin Siddique(ELEC), Anurag Sahoo(CPEG)

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