On March 3rd, the Girona Hacketon 2018 (HackathonGi 2018) took place in the Scientific and Technological Park in Girona, Spain. The Hacketon aims to bring together programmers, designers, IoT specialists, and other tech enthusiasts, with the aim to carry out a technology project in one single day. The challenge for this edition was straightforward: Build a prototype of a personal assistant, just as Facebook Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg built Jarvis in his 2016 personal challenge.

This year, the FIWARE Orion Context Broker played a key part in the event, even though none of the organizers had previous experience with the Context Broker. At HackathonGi 2017, a custom-made PHP API was used to help interconnectivity between different frontends (mobile and web) and all the IoT devices. The team were ready to use it again for the 2018 edition, until “someone proposed the idea of using a real industry-standard technology, and this is when the name FIWARE Orion came up”, said Victor Martin, Co-organizer of HackathonGi.

According to the team, first contact was easy as cake. “[We] just launched a FIWARE Orion Docker image, and after a couple CURL commands we took from the examples, we soon realized that it was exactly what we needed. It solved the [highly] demanded feature of subscriptions (notifications in FIWARE terminology)”. In turn, plenty of teams used it to receive webhooks from devices developed by different teams.

Mr. Martin added that “The most challenging part was making the $8 nodeMC LUA arduino devices parse the JSON messages coming from the Context Broker. Memory is very limited there, and developers had to be really careful and allocate only the essential objects and libraries to avoid device misbehaviour.” He continued by stating “FIWARE Orion was a great discovery. Powerful, easy to use and totally hassle-free. We are going to repeat for sure!”

All the projects developed during HackathonGi 2018 have been released as Open Source, and the sources are available on the HackathonGi Github organization.