On August 3-4, Gurtam held a challenging, rewarding, and outside-the-box flespi-powered hackathon! The goal of this event was to generate fresh ideas and explore new opportunities to apply telematics to existing and emerging demands of the market.
Here are some key figures about it:
13 teams
70+ participants
2 offline venues (Vilnius, Tbilisi) + remote locations
2 days
13+ solutions
8 nominations
3 (actually 4) winners
Rules & requirements
To ensure fair play and to put everyone in the same conditions, the contest set specific requirements to the resulting solution:
Develop a B2B SaaS solution for the telematics market.
Implement 2 solutions for 2 customers representing different business domains.
Use flespi as a backend.
Other technical and organizational requirements that we won’t cover here.
Teams
Even though hackathons are primarily aimed at engaging engineering talent, we had quite a few other professionals join the squads: project managers, business analysts, testers, implementation specialists, support specialists, designers, and even business development managers. No discrimination here! After all, the contest is not only about coding — it’s about delivering a solution that brings business value, appeals to specific audiences, and offers new vision.
Projects highlights
As you should have noticed in the Rules & requirements section, the teams were expected to deliver 2 solutions (in 2 days!!!), but they could have been implemented as a single project or separately. So the jury got 13+ new projects for evaluation. Let us make a brief overview and highlight their notable features.
💡 +++board — customizable industry-specific dashboard.
The solution aims at small fleet owners who need to assess the general health of their fleet, quickly identify problematic issues, analyze data over time, and be able to make informed decisions. The prototype showcased the dashboards for long-haul transportation and EV rental.
💡 Delivery — service matching warehouse owners and fleet owners.
The solution allows end users to place orders for delivery and see the statistics that will allow using company resources more efficiently.
I just need a scooter — ML-powered sharing business optimization service.
The solution aims at increasing the time people use sharing services, thus maximizing the profit of sharing businesses while making the services more convenient and attractive for end users.
💡 SmartSense — telematics & analytics system for efficient resource utilization.
The solution was showcased for trash utilization industry and implemented vehicle monitoring, order placement, invoice issuance, and other functionality to optimize the use of utility company resources.
💡 Flespi Open API service — improved API documentation to simplify understanding of the flespi platform.
This project is an attempt to make flespi API more comprehensible by forcing it to the wide-spread Open API standard.
💡 Where is my car? — remote car monitoring and alarm management.
The solution addresses a very common problem of car theft and gives the owner the possibility to manage the car and alarm remotely.
💡 ControlIT — real-time fleet events management & driver scoreboard.
The solution aims to provide convenient real-time events monitoring for medium and large fleets controlled by 3+ dispatchers.
💡 Petting app — universal pet and cattle monitoring solution suitable for private owners and farmers alike.
This project attempts to combine the functionality of the Petovik, Flo, and Fleetrun apps to deliver all-rounded animal monitoring including location, health state, maintenance schedule (vaccinations, etc.) and notifications, and more.
💡 CrashInsights — detailed crash analysis based on 3-axis accelerometer data.
This solution sends instant notification about the accident to the fleet dispatcher along with the detailed information about the specific spot where the vehicle was hit, the damage severity, estimated compensation cost, and more.
💡 VroomShare — moped crash detection based on accelerometer data.
The solution aim to detect moped fall-downs and collisions to timely notify the mechanics and ensure minimal idling time.
💡 KeepFuel — estimation of the economic efficiency of the transition from a gas fleet to a hybrid fleet.
The solution applies a sophisticated formula to determine how many liters of fuel the company can save by switching to a hybrid fleet and what economic effect this transition will have.
KeepTruck — this solution aims at evaluating road quality and estimating if improving it is economically reasonable.
💡 Alpha Rent Apartments — remote automated property management.
The solution helps owners and tenants to monitor the state of the property remotely and manage smart appliances, locks, and sensors.
💡 Pashukavik — the Odoo ERP system plugin for smart delivery services.
The solution matches the cargo owners and shipping companies to provide efficient order completion by ensuring quick client/executor matching, route optimization, contractor verification, and more.
💡 SpaceIN — indoor monitoring platform using BLE tags.
The solution offers a comprehensive solution for multiple business domains (logistics, banking, healthcare, etc.) that enables live indoor monitoring, geofencing, notifications, and more.
Flespi use
The one thing all the presented solutions had in common — they were all based on the flespi platform as a backend. The extent and tasks for which flespi was used varied a lot, but we want to highlight 3 most demanded features that many teams relied on:
Webhooks — to trigger internal or external actions based on the change of specific MQTT topics. You can check some webhook use cases here.
Calculators (aka “the almighty calculators”) — to get instant insights from the message flow, e.g. accidents, fuel theft, idling, harsh driving, mileage, you name it.
Plugins — to post-process (edit, augment, enrich) the incoming data, e.g. add address based on coordinates, check geofence it/out, apply custom parsing scheme, and so much more.
We’ll be talking a lot more about specific flespi use in our detailed posts about the most notable hackathon projects (stay tuned for that!).
Winners
It was a tough battle and the scores were tight (the projects were evaluated by 8 parameters). And here are the top 4 (instead of 3) solutions:
🥉: ControlIT (remote team with no group photo) and Where is my car?
🥈: CrashInsights
🥇: SpaceIN
Congrats to all the teams! 🎉
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This was a recap of what the Gurtam flespi-powered hackathon 2023 was like. It was a lot of fun, team-building, ideation, programming, and immersion into the flespi world. We are grateful to each and every team for their dedication, willingness to contribute, and openness to new experiences.
P.S. We will be publishing a series of more detailed technical posts focused on the most elaborate or technically non-trivial projects.