Concept to Creation in 24 hours

What can you build in a day? 

For participants in the Columbia University Robotics Club’s first-ever Hack & Build competition, answers spanned from creative devices to robots that make a real-world impact. 

The hardware hackathon, which took place In Carleton Commons and the Makerspace from Nov. 23 to 24, had 13 teams participating with a series of workshops and training sessions to help students with basic fundamentals. 

A number of projects were created with impact in mind. One team built a mechanical seeing-eye-dog, utilizing a roommate’s camera to help the dog perform localization tasks that allow it to navigate its surroundings. Another team built a speech-to-Braille translator, which takes in and processes speech with AI, triggering corresponding vibrations into a “sock.” Other projects were more geared towards novelty - one team designed an eyeball that flashed in sync when music was played around it, with human tracking capabilities. An additional team created a tongue that could dance to music while being controlled by hand gestures.

After submitting their projects, teams were tasked with impressing judges at the Hack & Build Expo. The panel included Columbia Engineering faculty members Sunil Agrawal, Ioannis Kymissis, and Simha Sethumadhavan, as well as alumnus David Watkins MS’17, PhD’22. 

In the end, three teams stood out as winners, taking home electronic prizes. 

Winners

First Place: Team 12 - A Self-Balancing Maze-Solver

Prahlad Vivek (SEAS), Akhil Vadlamudi (Architecture and Planning), Joyal Michael Puthur (SEAS)

Second Place: Team 3 - Speech-to-Braille Converter

Joseph Lee (GSAS), James Zhang (SEAS), Louis Zheng (CC)

Third Place: Team 8 - Face-Tracking Eyeball

Mengmeng Wang (SEAS), Guanjie Zhao (SEAS), Yunxi Zhu (SEAS), Yuhang Hu (SEAS)