IEEE student chapter organizes MAKECU 2016

March 04, 2016

Undergraduate hackers of all skill levels gathered at Columbia on February 13th  and 14th  to participate in MAKECU 2016 – Columbia’s second annual hardware hackathon. The event was organized by the Columbia IEEE student chapter and was sponsored by the Department of Electrical Engineering.

The event provided workspace for the participants as well as equipment including a standard circuits laboratory bench complete with power supplies and oscilloscopes. A variety of workshops were offered to familiarize the hackers with different kinds of hardware that they could use.

The 75 participants from Columbia, Northeastern, SUNY Stony Brook, and CUNY were inspired to explore their creative and engineering talents as they designed their projects from start to finish. The eight teams produced exciting projects ranging from a prosthetic hand (ReachOut Project - Overall winner) to an app that dispenses medication (RoboPill - 2nd Overall) and a small-scale EEG machine and muscle detection/analysis device (Chimerical - Best use of AWS). Columbia Electrical Engineering student Sarah Thompson was awarded “Best Beginner Hack” for her MyoMorse project on simple and direct gestural technology.

Cindy Xiao, Sayaan Nawaz, and Harrison Liew, Columbia EE students and MAKECU organizers, said their goal for MAKECU was “to spark an interest in the undergraduate community for hardware innovation, and to give incoming underclassmen the chance to see the kinds of creative projects they can create with simple pieces of hardware and a 24 hour time constraint. We hope that this will then generate an interest in electrical engineering for participants, as it did for us as organizers of this year’s event.”

Visit the EE Flickr Page to see more photos from this event.