Heart Rate Alarm

In early 2015, I was invited to a Microsoft Ventures Hackathon for the Microsoft Band. One of my friends, Mark Menezes, was also invited and together we were given a Band and two days to develop something that used it.

On a diet of Red Bull and pizza we worked with a preview of the Band SDK. The preview included a sample application, but for some reason it took us several hours to get to work with Android Studio.

We then delved into making the connection to the Band inside an Android Service. After many hours of experimentation, we were unable to get a connection to work to the Band inside a service. (After the hackathon, I discovered that we didn’t read the SDK preview correctly, and correcting the code we created during the hackathon lead to it working correctly.)

We moved onto working with Android timers to facilitate the Alarm functionality that we wanted. This was comparatively simple and we were able to get a working proof of concept design in a short amount of time.

On the second day, we demonstrated our work were we were given a warm reception. Our project was not very serious compared to the projects the other groups were working on, but we gained similar insights into the ease of use of the preview SDK and we all looked forward to seeing the public release of it.

Our adventure was put onto the UCL Department of Computer Science website, which you can view here: http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/computer_science_news/article/students-take-part-in-microsoft-band-hackathon/