EESTEC hackathon Ljubljana

In December, we held a week-long hackathon at the University of Ljubljana, held in collaboration with EESTEC. Students first attended three days of preparatory workshops, followed by a 24-hour hackathon. More than 15 participants from various European countries joined the webinar and travelled to Ljubljana to compete against bright engineering students.

During the workshops, students learned:

• How to connect to Red Pitaya and use it as a software-defined instrument
• How to control Red Pitaya with Python and MATLAB
• How to generate and receive arbitrary signals
• The basics of FPGA programming
• The basics of IR technology

After intense preparation and lots of new knowledge absorbed at the workshops, the students got ready to compete in the hackathon. It was named "Hacking Morse with Red Pitaya" because students needed to establish communication between two Red Pitaya units using Morse code as the communication protocol.

Participants were divided into four teams of three to five people for the duration of the hackathon. They had to solve the challenge by using FPGA or Python and the task was first to receive a signal and then communicate between two Red Pitaya units.

As a part of the challenge, they had to:

• Solder their own circuit
• Implement a  communication protocol that required some clever signal processing for encoding and decoding
• Create a user interface for their project

Even though the challenge was quite demanding, the participants managed to come up with some incredible solutions. Students were excited that they were able to use the knowledge they gained during the workshops so quickly and in such a practical way. 

Red Pitaya is proud to be educating future engineers.