Memorable 24 hours at HackNSUT!

An experience beyond comprehension

It has been more than a month since we did what no one would have ever imagined, when we made a very step out of our home. Actually not even us!. Remembering the evening of the March 30th, 2019 still sends shivers down my spine. It was the final of the prestigious Hackathon HackNSUT organised by NSUT. The competition was tough. Teams came from entire North India to participate in the overnight hackathon with their eyes full of dreams, belief and hope of winning the Hackathon. We were also among them. But we always knew that it’s not going to be easy for anyone of us. Many teams despite of having brilliant potential ideas were unfortunately not able to make it to Top 10. Selected Teams were gathered for the result. The environment was so tense and the competition was so high that by the time the result was announced probably no one in our team was left with nails on their fingers. It is a story of turning dream into reality, It is the story of achieving something great in 24 hours.
It is story of Team Enigma — Winners of HackNSUT’19.

Team Enigma — Sejal Bhatia, Sarthak Sadh, Jatin Kumar, Ashish Aggarwal

Dramatic Beginning

Till date we had attended many hackathons in various colleges throughout Delhi. But If I’m being honest the start we got in HackNSUT might be the one of the worst starts we ever got. Like any other team we came prepared with two ideas ~ a main idea and a backup idea. We found our primary idea quite innovative and were really excited about it. But, as we started to implement it, we began to explore loop holes in it, which apparently went unnoticed during the research phase (before hackathon). But we knew that we had ample time and we could fix them comfortably. But as we dug deeper and the number of loop holes also started to increase significantly and project started to make less sense overall. So at this time , we all knew that we had it all messed up and it needs to be replaced. Sadly till the time we realized, we had already wasted a few precious hours on it and guess what, the first evaluation was also just a mere few minutes away. At that instant we were nothing more than a bunch of helpless participants looking at each other with nothing to say. After some minutes of awkward staring, we realized that we were not done yet afterall. We still had something to offer.

Backup Idea - The Saviour

Our backup idea was also a decent one. But the problem was that we had not done any sort of research on it till yet and were not sure whether it can be implemented in given time frame or not. And let me please tell you, that in a hackathon implementation of an idea holds a real great importance. It might not matter how awesome your idea is, if it’s practical feasibility is in doubt.

Alright! Now what was the Idea ?

So the idea was to build an easily accessible application having every potential to turn your outdoor gym reluctant. In a nutshell we aimed to bring an artificial gym trainer in your mobile, so that you as a user can have an experience of a gym even when you are not at home or for some reason are not able to go to the gym. Due to the shortage of time, we could only train the application for one exercise as training ML models takes time. However in future we aim to expand the app even more, But for the time being it remains as it is. If you want, you can even see the final project live here.

Problems that it solved -

1. Busy people tend to have a hectic lifestyle and they do not have a fixed time routine to exercise. Due to which in the most cases they just pass on it and sometimes as a consequence may suffer from health related problems like obesity. But this app can help them solving this issue by giving them a possibility to exercise anytime they want completely as per thier will.
2. When a gym goer is unable to go to gym due to any understandable purpose like business trip, marriage etc. Their exercise routine kinda breaks and which is not a nice thing to happen. But in case he has our app he has nothing to worry about. He just need to find some time for exercise and then open our app in order to take advantage of the personal gym trainer feature. Problem Solved!
3. Some people who might be shy or don’t feel safe going to gym, can do the same exercises staying at home using our application.
4. Many more…

This app has endless use cases and it’s integration with other apps might expand the horizon even more. So if I’ll continue to talk about the problem’s it cam solve, we might not be able to talk about anything else. Which I surely would not wish to happen.

So how does it works ?

Let’s explore the app working through a diagrammatic representation.

As you may have very well already perceived from the above image that our application first analyses user’s position along with height and then calibrates accordingly. In the next step our application analyses your exercise movements by means of camera and update the wrap counter on every successful completion of a wrap. Then depending on your performance our app gives you valuable feedback. Large step is optional and shows performance of individuals in group.

So what actually happened at First evaluation ?

The application about which we’ve been talking so far was not even 10% ready till the first round of evaluation. All this was just in our dreams. Few minutes before the evaluation some mentors came by and talked to us. Mentors over there were very helpful and guided us very well throughout the hackathon. I would say that even some functionality that application had at the end was also inspired by some of their suggestions. Mentors were impressed by our backup idea and motivated us to work on it. When the first evaluation took place. We pitched our backup idea and explained the approach that we thought of using and some use cases where it may prove helpful when appied. During evaluation, evaluators were also kind enough to provide valuable insights and tips to improve it further. So the first evaluation was not that bad as we might have expected when we were helplessly staring at each other some moments ago.

Sleepless night of relentless coding

After first evaluation, Mindset of our team was very clear, We knew what the current goals were and how we could have achieved them. Now we just needed to give our very best in coding in order to turn all this to reality. And that’s exactly what we did, we didn’t sleep the whole night. We were just so exited about it. As we now knew from some friendly interactions with mentors that the idea had every potenial of winning, provided we’re able to get it done in left time frame. Finally at 07:00 in the morning we were ready with 90% of our target application. If I’m being honest it was actually ready much early than I would have expected. Hehe that’s power of determination for you!

What about top 10 ?

We had our second evaluation to get into top 10. This evaluation was completely different from the first one. The environment was comparatively more tense. In this round we pitched our project to mentors. We did our best but were still unsure because there were a lot of other talented teams too and there ideas seemed to be very promising as well. So it was pretty tough time for us to endure, because no one likes their sleepless hardwork getting wasted in couple of minutes. Finally after few minutes results were announced and fortunately our name was there! The moment they said Enigma, whole team got lit up, And why not it was after a long time that we had something to rejoice about.

Unforgettable Final

In final 10 teams pitched their ideas. While they pitched , I noticed that ideas of 2-3 teams were just phenomenal because they targeted some really crucial problems which demand thier share of attention urgently. But unfortunately lacked proper implementation. Therefore, unfortunately were not able to make to top 3. Finally much awaited moment arrived where announcer announced positions. And our team Enigma were declared as Winner of HackNSUT. It was the moment when our team’s collective sleepless effort paid off and we literally did something that we never could have imagined.

By means of this hackathon we learnt some very important life lessons which are not taught at school. I will also highly encourage you readers to participate in hackathons as much as possible because when you go out there, you will always bring something back with you, whether it’s new friends, new learnings or you never know even prizes.

I will say that competitions like hackathons tests more of your personality than your coding skills. If you are hardworking and determined than you can perform very well in a hackathon even if you lack some coding skills. Coding skills can be acquired but being determined exists in one’s personality.

I always believe that :

Everything seems to be impossible before being achieved

So Next time you go to any hackathon and get stuck at dead end. Just remember this line. It works for me, and there’s no reason that it would not work for you.

I hope that you enjoyed the story. Yes or No please let me know in comments.
I would be back with another good post very soon. Bye till next time.