Startup Bus: Hardware Hacking On The Highway

Get this, 30 people piled aboard a bus today and will spend the next 72 hours hacking their way to a successful startup idea. Oh and the bus will be moving the entire time; like the hacker version of Speed. Well, kind of.

What’s missing from this description? Hardware! That’s where Hackaday comes in. Just like with the NYC Hackathon, Hackaday wants to bring hardware to hackathons everywhere. We have a Hackathon page for StartupBus to document their builds and shipped them a box overflowing with Texas Instruments hardware (one of our illustrious Hackaday Prize sponsors). All that’s left is for the sleep (and shower) deprived passengers to hack together the next great thing.

Scheduled stops on the journey include Detroit (6/4), Pittsburgh (6/5), and their final destination of Nashville. We’ll be keeping our eye out for project updates from the contestants. But if you are one of the 30 hackers on the bus we’d love to see some pictures. Tweet your photos to @hackaday!

[Photo Source: Entrepreneurship Club]

28 thoughts on “Startup Bus: Hardware Hacking On The Highway

  1. I hope they have better suspensions on that bus than the regular long-haul buses I ride sometimes in Malaysia/Singapore. On the buses I ride it’s more or less impossible to type properly on a keyboard – and I wouldn’t even dare trying to solder anything smaller than finger-sized items :-)

  2. So they’re too cheap to rent a meeting room and then they sucker people into paying for this “l33t” competition that involves a stinky bus, no work tables, and lots and lots of motion sickness. Wow, what a great scam. Tom Sawyer would oh so proud.

  3. The next step would be “hacking on a plane”.

    I guess the mighty goal:
    Get the plane under your control!
    And the first who wins before out of fuel,
    will be the king who will rule.

    1. Yeah! And: After takeoff the pilot locks autopilot, FMS and cockpit door with borg encryption codes and bails out. And the prize will be everyones-life-saved karma and a McDonalds-style birthday crown…

      1. Apparently he never claimed that.

        FBI wilfully misrepresented what he actually claimed: he has taken over simulated airplane hardware and commanded it – in a simulated environment.

        The guy and the FBI are booth partaking in FUD.

  4. Jeez, motion sickness would kill me in tens of minutes if i would start hacking on a moving road vehicle. Although i really like such new ideas to get together hacking and getting sponsored by companies like TI, this one seems to me uuhhmm…. just plain moronic.

    Hey, how ’bout a hacking marathon in a strip club?

  5. Way back in the late 90s when I was into the Rave scene, there used to be parties on trains and buses, airplanes, ships, etc.. They gave them names like ‘Transatlantic Move’.

    Dancing and partying while traveling seems doable – but I dont know about writing code or “hardware hacking”.

    Groups are getting funding for all sorts of things – just look at hackaday over the last year. Not all of the approaches make sense from any point of view except marketing.

    Still, I dont want to be totally negative. Yeah, it seems a bit silly if not misguided, this bus, but it would be fun to be involved with it in some way.

    I personally have enough trouble with any of these competitions. If I wanted to take part in these competitions, my approach would be much different than the one I use to actually develop things and make things happen. Basically, as far as I can tell, these competitions are like the final performance after a lot of preparation – and the prep is far more important than the performance.

  6. Nice, a bus full of smelly nerds without broadband internet and hot running laptops under the summer sun. Soon, the air conditioning will fail, as it always does. After a few hours, the first will puke because of motion sickness. Then, others will take their shoes of and expose their sweaty, smelly feet to the air, poisoning the atmosphere. Then, there will be the first cases of nerd rage, because someone’s making funny noises, has a clicking keyboard or is listening the wrong music…..

    But the bus is unstoppable, and the the horror trip goes on.

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