The day before Formula Tech Hacks, I was still looking for a team. I found another guy named Aryan, with one A, who was also looking for teammates, so I messaged him: "Haha, we have the same name. We should be a team." Turns out he already had two other people, but after talking for a bit, he told me I was the most "cracked" person who had reached out. So somehow, I was in.
- Result
- P1
- Project
- ApexTrace
- Theme
- Safety
- Chassis
- Pizza boxes
The theme changed everything
We had already decided before the hackathon that we wanted to build an F1 simulator with a physical steering wheel. Then the theme dropped: Safety. That completely changed the direction of the project. Instead of just building a racing simulator, we asked:
What happens when the systems keeping an F1 driver safe start failing?
That became ApexTrace, a simulator designed to deliberately introduce failures across the car's sensors, telemetry and warning systems and see whether the driver could react in time.
A side quest on day one
Day 1 also had its own win: there was a trivia quiz running alongside the hackathon, the hardest one they hosted, and I ended up taking first place. Prize was a shirt.
Controlled chaos
The rest of the hackathon was basically controlled chaos. We needed a physical steering wheel, but the lab's 3D printer was closed, and the next closest printer was at the Waterloo Library. With time running out, we decided to do what any reasonable engineering team would do: recycle our pizza boxes and turn them into a steering wheel. We packed an ESP32, two IMUs, a joystick, display and haptic feedback into the cardboard, and somehow got it working.
Chequered flag
After two days of building, breaking, and rebuilding, ApexTrace ended up taking P1 at Formula Tech Hacks.