originally written as an entry for the i4c blogging contest.
July 13th, 2019
‘A-R-C-I-S’
It took a moment to collect my thoughts. I turned to my teammates, who were as awestruck as I was. As we stood up, the entire venue broke into a thunderous applause. We were underdogs, a team with no project mentors, who started out completely clueless. Still, it is said that the journey is always greater than the sum of its parts, and this is the story of how my team won the Hardware edition of the biggest hackathon of its kind in the world!
The Before
I got to know about SIH through my college some time in late December 2018. Fresh off the success in a couple of hackathons, I was eager to participate in this too. I went through the ideas list on the site, had a few ideas and decided to work on them. The first problem? I needed a team of 6. I wasn’t exactly a team player, both my earlier hackathons had been solo affairs. I always thought of a team as a hindrance that would slow me down and get in the way. Still, I was a part of the Aero Design team of my college, and I convinced some of my friends to sign up.
The idea submission phase deadline was during my college internal exams. I had recently watched Avengers: Infinity War and inspired by Thanos’ Infinity gauntlet, I decided on building a ‘smart workout gauntlet’. During the video submission phase, I hacked together an extremely crude prototype and submitted it. My college did not have a great track record in the 2017 and 2018 iterations of this hackathon, and as a consequence I wasn’t very optimistic.
When the shortlist for the Grand Finale came out in April, I was surprised to see my team had made it. After our final exams concluded in May, I decided to meet my teammates. One of them didn’t attend any of our early meetings, and two of them decided to drop out. I was left with only 3 members in my team, myself included.
In hindsight, this was obvious. I had not discussed my ideas with my teammates before making the idea submission, I had not taken them into confidence, what else would possibly happen? In a team, communication is essential. If your teammates aren’t speaking up, it doesn’t mean everything is okay.
Fortunately, by talking to other members of the Aero Design team, and taking care to pitch the idea to them before asking them to sign up, I was able to get 3 brilliant members onboard. Together with my other two teammates who believed in the idea, we formed a very heterogeneous team. My team consisted of:
- Ashutosh Pandey (Me), Computer Science, 2nd year
- Ravi Maurya, Aeronautical Engg, 3rd year
- Bapu Pruthvidhar, Electronics and Comm Engg, 1st year
- M C Pooja, Electronics and Comm Engg, 2nd year
- Vaishnavi L, Mechanical Engg, 2nd year
- Nayan Ganguli, Aeronautical Engg, 1st year.
My team consisted not only of students from 3 years of study, it also had students from 4 different streams of engineering. We were from different parts of India and spoke different languages. Ultimately, having this kind of diversity really helped because it helped bring different thought processes to the table.
We prepared in the Library of our college, reading research papers on Machine Learning, getting data on movement by tapeing mobile phones to our arms, and trying to build a 3-D printed prototype. A couple of days before we left for Veltech Chennai (where our Nodal center was), we came up with our first 3D printed prototype and something was immediately obvious as soon as we tried it out. It was too big and heavy.
The Hackathon
We reached Veltech early in the day before the hackathon. Since it was July, the college was closed for summer break. It was a huge campus, and the hackathon venue was over a kilometer away from the hostel. We were asked to pre register at the venue, and it was gigantic. Huge tables flanked with coolers, extension boxes, teams huddled over, discussing their plans. Every team had a mentor, except for ours. The campus coordinator greeted us and gave us a bag full of the hardware I had requested. I was surprised, because some of those components were really expensive. He then showed us the place where the 3D printers were kept, and they were state of the art Stratasys machines. It was at that moment that we understood that SIH was leaving no stone unturned, there were no excuses we could give. We had to win. That night, Ravi and I sat down to rework the design.
Day 1 started off well. We were told that there would be no judging that day, but during the evening a jury of 3 judges arrived for a ‘pre-judging round’. The conversation followed:
Me: ‘Sir we have built an exercise tracking gauntlet that can track unconventional exercises like pushups, situps and dumbbell curls’.
Them: ‘Who is it for?’
Me: ‘Sir, anybody who is interested in fitness’.
They went on to criticise the design for being too heavy and large, they also said that we had done no market analysis on who this was for. No product is for everybody, they said. That night, we went to 3D print.
Over the course of the next few days, we settled into a routine. Ravi and Nayan would design in the daytime, Bapu and Pooja would work on the Machine Learning code, Vaishnavi worked on the electronics (Raspberry Pi) and I’d work on preparing to pitch to the jury each day, along with assembling the hardware.
One of the most important lessons I learnt during this time period was ‘iteration’. To end up with a polished product, it is very important to make multiple prototypes, each one better than the last. Our design mentor, Mr Vaibhav Belgaonkar helped us a lot during this process.
On day 3, we were high on confidence, since the review the previous day had gone well. We got word in the morning that Abhay Jere sir would be visiting, and we thought we had the product pitch down to perfection. But you see, he wasn’t interested in the pitch, he was interested in the product! When we showed him the 3D printed shell, he asked ‘Is a screen really necessary? Everyone has a mobile phone.’ He said it was way too big and would hinder exercise, as devices like fitbit are really thin and light. He also gave a speech in the evening, where he said one thing that stuck with me till the end.
‘Jugaad is not innovation. Jugaad is a quick hack. It is not long lasting and well designed.’
This forced us to rethink our entire strategy from the ground up again. We had reduced the product size by over half by iteration 3, and reduced the weight from 567 grams to 129 grams. It was clear, the screen had to go. Our product would not strictly even be a gauntlet anymore, it would be a ‘sleeve’. We headed out to decathlon on the morning of the 4th day, to buy Li-ion batteries and spandex sleeves that athletes wear. Ravi did a radical redesign of the whole product, bringing down the weight to less than 30 grams! Vaishnavi also suggested that we make a UI mockup in Adobe XD to show to the judges what features we envisaged in the app. Bapu perfected his ML model, and Pooja found the code to run the sensors directly off the Raspberry Pi Zero, and we ditched the Arduino entirely. Overnight, we had changed our entire tech stack and had come up with a good use case – This project would be dedicated to monitoring the exercise of athletes. We would target exercises like the javelin throw, dumbbell curls, sit ups etc.
The chair of the jury, Nandakumar sir visited us every now and then during the hackathon- he said we would stand no chance of winning unless we had a fully functional product.
The final night was difficult. The code wasn’t running, but we didn’t give up. Some time at around 4 AM, finally a thought flashed in my mind to run the code directly off the command line terminal, and it worked! We began training the model for different exercises. The 5th day’s pitch to the jury did not even have any presentation slides. We just showed our product working, and made the jury try it out. We were just happy to make it work. The results were announced that evening, and the rest, they say, is history!
So what did SIH teach me? The most important lesson was to see my product dispassionately, to accept criticism, to iterate my design and to understand the true meaning of what it meant to innovate. I also learnt the importance of teamwork and getting everyone onboard. For that, I am forever indebted.
Here’s the video we recorded after the finals:
Sapience 