If there’s one thing Pinata loves, it’s hackathons. It’s not only because Pinata was born out of a hackathon, but also because it’s where we see unfiltered ideas and creativity from some of the undiscovered and brightest developers of the future. HackUTD 2024 was no exception, as there were over 1,100 students who attended, which made it the second largest 24-hour hackathon in the United States. We were excited to help sponsor this year’s event, and we had over 55 teams submit their projects to the Pinata challenge statement, which was:

We’re challenging teams to unleash their creativity and build the most unique, game-changing full-stack application using only Pinata—no external databases allowed. Show us how you can push boundaries and create something that truly stands out!

These hackers did not disappoint as they worked tirelessly through the night with ambition and creativity. We had a total of three prizes, but narrowing our decision to just a few projects was seriously tough. There were so many great submissions and we applaud all of them! Let’s deep dive into our top three and some honorable mentions.

1st: Monch

Jackson Moody, Joshua Zhang, Josh Zhang, Pedro Garcia

Coming in first place is Monch, an app that lets you track nutrition by logging in and simply taking a picture of your food. The team trained their own neural network to scan the image of your food, detect what it is, then provide nutritional information such as calories, carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. This data would then be stored on Pinata, where each food is a file in a group for the logged in user. Monch provides interactive graphs to visualize your intake for the day, as well as give multiple meals in a day. This combination of using Pinata’s file storage, key-value metadata, date stamps, and AI was a truly impressive hackathon project!

2nd: Capsule

Erick Le, Annel Suarez

Our favorite hacks are the ones that solve real world problems, and that’s precisely what Capsule does. Erick saw a need to easily and securely share critical health information with care providers, especially when the patient is a relative that might have trouble providing said info. Capsule allows users to create an account, then create multiple capsules. Each capsule is a person’s information - including their name, address, date of birth, photo, even important documents such as histories or prescriptions. All of it is stored as a single file on Pinata, utilizing the extra storage available in the key-value stores. It also uses the Files API, which means the data is kept private and only revealed when it needs to be. The team went above and beyond in presentation and polish, as well as implementing capsules into NFC cards. They plan to work on the project more in the coming months!

3rd: Cheddarboxd

Joe Malatesta

It’s important not to get too serious when building at hackathons, and Pinata knows this better than anyone else since we tend to lean into more whimsical and fun ideas. Joe decided he’d take a bet on a fun track himself with Cheddarboxd. As the name suggests, this app is similar to Letterboxed, but lets you review cheese with friends. Cheddarboxd also features full auth and every cheese review is a file that takes advantage of Pinata’s key-value store. We loved Joe’s creativity behind this app and also enjoyed the cheese provided at the demo! 🧀

Honorable Mentions

As we said earlier, it was difficult to narrow down our picks to just three winners, and so we would like to take a little time to shout out some other awesome projects we saw at HackUTD!

DecentraHealth

Nehanth Narendrula, Lokesh Narasani

This team pulled off something truly impressive; video streaming with IPFS. Since IPFS is immutable and static file storage, making video streaming possible is not an easy feat, and something we’ve only seen once before in one of Pinata’s internal hackathons. Nehanth and Lokesh used it to build a decentralized health platform called DecentraHealth, designed to make doctor screenings more accessible to remote people. The team also implemented AI powered diagnostics where it could capture medical data by taking photos of your wounds. It was truly something special to see and we’re excited to see where these young developers go!

MilkTrip

Aiden Seibel, Yash Shah, Evan

Another app that solved some real world problems was MilkTrip, an iOS app that tracked food prices across multiple grocery stores and provided rich charts and graphs; perhaps one of the few chart applications where you want to see them go down! This team also used Pinata for storing food data and pictures, once again showing how easy it is to use Pinata’s storage.

“Pinata was the easiest backend I’ve ever implemented with an iOS app” - Aiden Seibel

Wrapping Up

24 hours goes by pretty quickly, but we won’t forget how amazing HackUTD was this year. From start to finish, we experienced a fully polished hackathon with huge gratitude to the team that ran it. A special thank you to Ridwan Amin and his team who took such good care of us. We can’t wait to come back!