What happens when three JKI engineers walk into a solar hackathon armed with LabVIEW and a passion for solving technical challenges and making a big difference in the world? They win, of course!
Yes! Our team won 2nd place at the 4th annual SunCode solar hackathon organized by Powerhouse. This event brings together developers, designers, and entrepreneurs that want to create the solar software, financial solutions, and design projects that shape the future of the renewable energy industry.
Winning this award is important in and of itself, but what’s even more impressive is that we used LabVIEW to write the winning software application. Everyone has heard of Python, JavaScript, and other mainstream languages being used at hackathons, but almost nobody is using LabVIEW. Perhaps, now, that’s going to change!
So, how did we do it?
We worked on the idea of an energy trading platform, where you can buy and sell your energy at a given time of the day. For the implementation, LabVIEW is at the backend controlling all of the business logic and interacting with UtilityAPI. At the front end, a combination of AngularJS and D3.js are in charge of the user experience. The bridge between LabVIEW and JavaScript is a combination of a RESTful API and websockets.
Overall, we had a blast! The diversity among the attendees to the hackathon was inspiring - people from different backgrounds, ages, and countries coming together to literally try to make the world a better place. Kudos to the SunCode event organizers. I cannot wait for next year's hackathon!
Perhaps we’ll start seeing LabVIEW showing up (and wining) in more hackathons in the near future.
