Powered by Pinata is a new series on the Pinata blog for readers to learn more about Pinata’s customer base. We’re honored by all the customers that use Pinata, and we’ll be sharing some of those customers’ stories while highlighting the most interesting brands in the NFT space. Note: none of these stories are sponsored, nor have we paid to work with these brands or teams.

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Every year at Hack the North, Canada’s largest hackathon, students and innovators come together to offer some of the most exciting projects and initiatives in technology. This year, we were particularly impressed with one group of finalists who created scaNFT, a hack that takes any physical item and automates the process of minting it as an NFT in just a few minutes.

The team behind scaNFT is comprised of a group of students from the University of Waterloo and the University of Guelph. Melda Kiziltan, Emerson Gabber, Patrick Kim, Shaheer Rana- all second-year students studying in mechatronics, mechanical and software engineering, had just learned about NFTs only a few days before the hackathon. With the challenge at hand, they saw an opportunity to put their minds together and apply their engineering and software skills.

How it works

The students used a turntable mount to place the item on, and created an environment using a RaspberryPi, that automatically rotates the item as it takes pictures at every angle. From there, the pictures are uploaded to 3DF Zephyr and meshed to create a 3D image. Finally, they put their new learnings about NFTs to work and used Node.js, npm, JavaScript, Python, and 3DF Zephyr on the software end to create, process, and upload the NFT to Pinata. They share how it was built and the tools they used in this video, as well.

The entire project was created within an astounding 24-hour span. The students shared that their proudest accomplishment was the process of learning new languages, technologies and putting them together to create this hack while playing to their team’s strengths.

ScaNFT caught Pinata’s attention at Hack the North for its potential to help industries untapped by the NFT space so far. “By generating 3D scans that create IDs of physical objects, projects like scaNFT open up the possibility of reliably transferring assets between organizations in supply chains. NFTs will produce deep visibility into the supply chain and help automate them even further, especially with the adoption of IoT devices and other sensors,” shared Kyle Tut, CEO at Pinata.

What’s next

So what’s next for the students after this? In their devpost article, the students shared that they’d like to develop a true automation pipeline to completely automate the process from beginning to end. They also want to create a front end for users, add prices for the NFTs, and add more personalization and the ability to change users.

Got an NFT project that you think will change the way work happens?

Send your projects/ideas/etc to [email protected]