Last week the first edition of Hack the Cloud took place, a hackathon organised by GARR together with the University of Milano-Bicocca to encourage the use of cloud technologies like Openstack and Kubernetes.
The aim of the hackathon was to build, in less than 8h, a project for a Smart City that integrated OpenData and GARR’s cloud network.
Roadsense
Our project (Roadsense) is based on fitting smart sensors on surface public transport, with a twofold goal: monitoring the state of the lines to spot any problems along the routes and, at the same time, thanks to motion sensors, detecting the condition of the urban road surface, aggregating the data from the different buses and flagging problematic situations.During the hackathon we managed to build a good part of the backend and of the webapp for monitoring the lines and the roads; we also developed a prototype of the software to be installed on the sensors, into which, for the occasion, we fed simulated data based on the Open Data of the City of Milan.
Technologies
The whole project was hosted on a two-node kubernetes cluster hosted on the GARR network.
Building the project was split into two components
Backend
The backend was developed in PHP with Symfony. Its goal was to provide an API for the sensors on the buses and to provide a web interface to view the data in real time.
Sensors
We also built a fake bus able to move along the routes made available by Milan’s OpenData and send fake updates to the backend.
Result
We came third, tied with another group. The list of the other winning projects is available on the official website https://hackthecloud.it/it/vincitori.
