What do you get when you place six strangers in a single room for 22 hours? A prototype called the HyBOT — a smart water bottle that purifies your drinking water, tracks your hydration and notifies you via cellphone when you need to drink.
Motorola’s MAKEwithMOTO roadshow stopped at N.C. State’s James B. Hunt Jr. Library from Aug. 16-18 to host a “MAKEaTHON.” Four teams competed in a battle of creativity and ingenuity to design and build a prototype.
The participants were given a blend of low- and high-tech prototyping tools to use, including a full set of 3-D printers, 3-D systems and Motorola’s latest smartphones.
The winning team, Team Transformers, was comprised of Alexandra La Pierre, a sophomore in plant and soil sciences, Ksenia Sedova, a senior in computer engineering, John Daniel, a sophomore in biological sciences, Ben Dunko, a sophomore at Enloe High School in Raleigh, Brain Carrigan, employee at Cree LED Lighting Company in Morrisville, and Alex Benham, a senior at the Steven’s Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ.
“Day one we kind of just walked up — we didn’t have any idea what we were going to do,” Daniel said. “We formed teams and had the option of picking a theme, we chose aquatics and somehow that ventured into water purification systems.”
The innovation-intensive event started with an evening when “strangers” met, formed teams and came up with a product idea that would require extensive design and prototyping.
“By the end, we all felt like we had been working with each other for a long time,” La Pierre said. “We felt like we really knew each other.”
Sedova attributed the team’s bond to the amount of time they spent working toward a common goal.
“Mostly we were able to feel that way because we had been sitting in a single room for 22 hours,” Sedova said. “It wasn’t a straight 22 hours, there was some sleep in the middle, but it felt like we had been working together for weeks.”
The entire MAKEaTHON ran from Friday, Aug. 16, at 5:30 p.m. to Sunday, Aug. 18, at 3:00 p.m. when the final presentations were made.
“We presented to a room of people and a Google Hangout live on the Internet to the Motorola executives and essentially anyone else who wanted to join in,” La Pierre said.
According to Daniel, the event attracts worldwide attention, however he was surprised when the international audience began to interact.
“There were people all over the world watching and asking questions,” Daniel said.
Daniel and La Pierre stressed just how quickly their deadline approached and said the team worked until the final minutes of the competition.
“We literally worked until the last minute finishing the thing,” Daniel said.
Though the presentation went smoothly, the team said they encountered their fair share of technical difficulties en route to the project reveal.
“Our logo was falling off in the last three seconds before we walked into the room,” La Pierre said.
Their winning design, the HyBOT, connects to your cellphone, which allows a user to control and customize the function from a smartphone.
“You can enter in all your personal statistics like body weight and how often you exercise and it will take an algorithm and calculate how much water you need to be drinking based on that,” La Pierre said.
The team programmed the bottle to vibrate and light up when it’s time to hydrate.
Team Transformers won $15,000 from Motorola to begin the process of making their prototype a reality.
“It sort of hit us in the face,” La Pierre said. “It’s very real.”
Along with the $15,000, Team Transformers received an Indiegogo platform that operates in the same way as a Kickstarter campaign. If Team Transformers is able to raise $15,000 through Indiegogo, Motorola will match them with another $15,000.
“They were really all about just letting students come in and create something,” Sedova said. “The key part of creating the product is it really was modular and created with whatever we had. What we need to do is integrate everything into a single bottle prototype such that it’s a really nice product. Maybe learn some lessons from Apple here and make something that’s really pretty and easy to use.”
Team Transformers was unaware of the cash prize that came with winning the competition.
“We had no idea we were going to win something,” La Pierre said. “We figured it was just for fun.”
The members of Team Transformers agreed they had gained more knowledge after completing the project than they had going into it.
“When I came in I told everybody that I didn’t have any specialty,” Daniel said. “I just wanted to learn from each of them.”
Sedova credited the knowledge he gained to the physical experience and hands-on work.
“I knew a few things but I certainly learned a lot of new things,” Sedova said. “Really most of it was on the fly, just doing things.”
According to Sedova, they weren’t able to incorporate all their ideas into their first HyBOT prototype, but there is nothing stopping them from saying the final product’s possibilities are endless.
“In the future we’ll be able to implement some of the amazing things we wanted to do and had imagined,” Sedova said.
Team Transformers is already looking to the future of the HyBOT. They plan to try to work with the Kenan Institute, the National Science Foundation-backed center on Centennial campus. They have also received a swell of support from various professors on campus.
“Ben’s dad [Gregory Dunko, director of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Design Center] has said he’ll do his best to help and support us … even with finding more funding,” Daniel said. “It’s great to hear that other people are trying to help.”
In the end, Team Transformers is still trying to digest the reality of what was once just a sketch on their white board.
“I guess they really believe in the idea that the youth really have what it takes to bring technology to the next level,” La Pierre said. “They’re really into making sure experiences like this are available for people with creative minds.”
