RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon

I took part in a hackathon in Vilnius the other weekend (courtesy of Basedcollective) during the pink soup festival. I brought along an old rotary phone and our two-man team spent the next 48 hours sticking our fingers in it. We wired a Raspberry Pi into the phone which interfaced with all of its IO and communicated with our server via a single websocket connection which controlled everything from two-way audio, the bell ringer (with custom frequency and audio patterns) and the hangup switch. For the demo, we set up an AI agent which could research music, create playlists and play collections of niche music all via the Spotify API on request. Interpreting requests such as:

“play some music by artists who are alleged to be on the Epstein files”

or

“create me a playlist of 70s Zambian psychedelic rock”,

et cetera

We put the personality of a warm Yorkshire gentleman on the other end of the line (courtesy of ElevenLabs) and had good fun getting all the parts working together ready for the final demo under 48 hours later.

As is the evolving trend with writing code nowadays, neither me nor my team-mate looked at a single line of code over the entire weekend. Something which would have been unheard of just 12 months ago has become today's reality. As it was a hackathon, all we cared about was that it worked and the inner lines of code didn't matter.

For this reason, the focus of hackathons has completely shifted away from typing code with aching fingers and zero sleep, to thinking of the system as a whole (not a very unique opinion now, I know) and iterating on intricacies of implementation with radical refactors has become a trivial task. This leaves free mental RAM to actually faff with hardware and how it interfaces with the physical world.

All of this really makes me think:

What does a hackathon moonshot idea really look like nowadays?

As software subtends to becoming more and more "solved", a web-app which may have been a fantastic feat 24 months ago has now tumbled into mediocrity. How do we continue to push the hackathon bar further? This is where I think hardware comes in.

In the coming months, we are going to see more of an emphasis on hardware hackathons than we did before. Something I would like to see specifically is a renaissance of old tech which had previously required very niche and time consuming domain knowledge to mess with.

Some project ideas off the top of my head:

• Building a ridiculous Apple II application

• Turning a fax machine into a social media network

• Turning a Game Boy Advance into a Bloomberg terminal

• Making an LLM-driven cash register that can feel love and pain

• An AI voice-activated microwave

These are just some ideas...

Yes there’s probably no real sane business case in any of these projects but I am also of the opinion that hackathons should be a bit ridiculous. I don’t want to see your VC pitch and the problem you are solving, I want to see an unholy, overbuilt and morally confusing obelisk of wires and APIs, a hubris manifest in a breadboard paired with a frankenstein'd consumer electronics item that makes me question my very own reality.