After getting laid off from my job on Wednesday I really had nothing else to do so when I heard about a hackathon on board an aircraft carrier parked in the San Francisco Bay on Friday night, I decided to get in the car and drive up. Really nothing to lose right?
The USS Hornet
It was a pretty worthy use of time. The hackathon turned out to have been put together with a lot of help from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces as well as a bunch of U.S. military acronym-y things I’m mostly unfamiliar with, however, it was a good reminder that there are people dealing with far worse situations than the one I’m experiencing. The defense people came up with 15 different challenges from real battlefield situations, mostly about drones and software defined radio and so forth, that they wanted assistance from the around 400 tech nerds that showed up in solving. A company called CodeMetal was also on site handing out boards with some advantages in that domain and I managed to take one of those kits and use the Heltec Wifi Tracker module to detect the network from a DJI Trello drone. Pretty cool stuff!
Serial printout from my drone tracker