Team Uses Sigfox to Win the”Future Realities” Auckland Hackathon

New Zealand, May 15th 2017 – How IoT and the Sigfox NZ network could save people lost in the bush?

The Auckland Hackathon, part of the Future Realities AR/VR/IoT event,  ran over two days and called on tech developers, students, creatives and ideas people to mash up technology to connect the real world to the virtual world. Future Realities organisers were after bright minds with great ideas to make the hackathon an outstanding event.

This new breed of hackathon was an opportunity to dive into problems in teams of 3-5 individuals formed around a project, such as building a new data visualization or collaboratively solving a problem with AR/VR/IoT technologies.

The hacking began with each participant presenting their potential project to invite members to join their team.
The winning idea, named “Rescue the lost ones”, was proposed by Junwoo Chang. The idea came to him when he and his family got into a car accident on a day trip in the woods, and since they were out of cellular coverage and couldn’t call emergency, they had to walk a few hours till they were able to call the police. He mentioned he had experienced quite a stressful journey. Mr Chang, fearing for his life, resolved to find a solution to prevent this kind of situation.

The solution would involve an emergency device to call for help. To achieve maximal signal range, Sigfox LPWAN connectivity proved to be the most suitable: the network covers a large portion of New Zealand, is very long range, the use case does not require sending a lot of data and the device must last a long time – requiring very low power consumption/infrequency recharges.

The user would simply press a button to send the alert and the geolocation.

The hardware used for the prototyping was a Pycom SiPy, using Sigfox connectivity and MicroPython programming language. A rotary encoder allows the user to select the kind of alert to send, using a colour code displayed by LED.

At the end of the event, a wrap-up session gave each project a chance to demonstrate their accomplishments and the “Rescue the lost ones” project using Sigfox LPWAN won the event.

We would like to thank Peroze Irani and Joris Mangel from Thinxtra New Zealand for supporting this event and providing Sigfox knowledge and their own experiences to assist the winning team.

About Future Realities
Future Realities is a leading event in the #Techweek17 NZ program, in partnership with IBM BlueMix. It is run by John McDermott of the IoT Auckland Meetup.
More infos:

About Thinxtra
Thinxtra is empowering the Internet of Things in Asia Pacific by deploying the world-leading Sigfox LPWA network as well as building a full eco-system of IoT solutions and services to enable the non-connected to connect, to increase productivity, accelerate decision making, improve quality of service and quality of life, and find more economical solutions to common problems. Sigfox is the world’s leading provider of connectivity for the Internet of Things (IoT). The company has built a global network to connect billions of devices to the Internet while consuming as little energy as possible, as simply as possible.
Sigfox’s unique approach to device-to-cloud communications addresses the three greatest barriers to global IoT adoption: cost, energy consumption, and global scalability. Thinxtra’s Sigfox network currently covers 71% of the population in Australia and 89% of the population in New Zealand and will start deployment in Hong Kong by June 2017. It will cover 95% of the population of those countries by the end of 2017.
Thinxtra was founded by IoT and network experts who share a common passion for connecting things to improve business processes and people lives. It is backed by NZX-listed high-tech company Rakon Limited, which has a history of innovation in communications technology going back some 50 years.

For more information, contact:
Renald Gallis – VP Marketing and Ecosystem
[email protected] +61 404 894 960