College campuses are already sizzling with energy, but when you cram 400 hackers from campuses in the area into a single building and give them 36 hours to build the best apps they can come up with, the energy becomes so intense that I was close to firing up my MacBook and coding something myself. Last weekend, we were in Ithaca, New York for Cornell’s annual BigRed Hacks. The hackathon invites students from Cornell and other campuses in the region to participate in a weekend competition of programming prowess.

For this year’s competition, Pinata put up a $2,500 prize for best use of Pinata. We purposefully left the guidelines vague to encourage the maximum amount of creativity. We were not disappointed.

The students built projects ranging from mobile virtual closets to hardware powered anti-slouching tools. With only 36 total hours to build, it was incredible to see what people came up with, and it was amazing to see how they used Pinata.

We ran a short workshop to highlight how Pinata’s tools would make file upload and retrieval easy, and the consensus among the hackers in the room was that they were relieved and excited that there was an alternative that didn’t require them to use AWS’s S3.

As everyone worked, they took advantage of the materials available, including the normal tools of education. Blackboards with program diagrams lined the walls around the venue.

On Sunday, it was time for students to submit there projects, and that’s when the real fun began. At least, for us. We got to judge the submissions, and we couldn’t have been more impressed. The creativity on display made it hard to pick just one winner. However, after a good deal of deliberation, we did manage to pick our award winner.

The Winner

The winner of the Pinata challenge was a project called Respoke. The Respoke team set out to solve a problem they’d seen in the real world.

Online course books with equations are not friendly for screen readers, making them inaccessible to those with disabilities. Traditional accessibility tools struggle to parse LaTex equations, so the team wanted to solve this.

They built a novel solution in the form of a Google Chrome extension that would take the LaTex equation and send it to a large language model to be converted into contextual audio. Then, the Chrome extension would insert the audio on the page, making is significantly more accessible for those that needed help.

The team used Pinata to store the audio files and to fetch the audio files on the page. They used Pinata’s keyvalue store to help organize and query the audio files they needed to load on the page.

“We started using Pinata as we finished our AI pipeline to store the generated files and serve the easily. Typically, I get pretty confused when trying to upload a file in a python variable to an API, but it was relatively painless with Pinata. I was able to find good documentation on their API routes, so although Python didn't officially have an SDK for it, I was able to get the file uploads working relatively quickly. It was actually really easy the whole way through - the routes needed to add metadata, search, and upload files at will were seamless enough that I was inspired to try using Pinata as not just a file hosting service but also a growing cache. To my surprise, it didn't take long to get that working - something I would not expect from something like Google Cloud or other big names.”
- Wayne He

Albon Wu and Wayne He built an impressive tool that can solve real problems and can be extended to even more use cases in the future. And that’s what hackathons are all about, pushing yourself to solve problems and have fun within the constraints of a tight time limit.

Shoutout to the BigRed Hacks organizers for putting on an incredible hackathon!

If you’re ready to hack on your own project, try Pinata for free.