u-blox announced that the ‘Thank You’ project, led by designers Ed and Jeff Arenberg, has won the first place $5,000 prize for the ‘Best Use of u-blox Technology’ at this year’s two-day AT&T Hackathon.
Part of a the AT&T 2016 Developer Summit recently held in Las Vegas, the award is for the best application that makes use of u-blox’s cellular and/or positioning technologies.
The “Thank You” app is a service that encourages courteous driving by rewarding drivers for their good driving behaviour, such as giving space for a car exiting a driveway or merging into another lane. The driver can initiate a ‘Thank-You’ to the driver of the other vehicle by means of a simple voice command or a hand gesture. This event triggers all nearby vehicles to upload their recent GPS data to M2X, the AT&T IoT cloud platform, following receipt of a Bluetooth beacon signal. The AT&T Flow service coordinates the reception of such data which is then sent to an IBM BlueMix data analysis service to determine which vehicle deserves the thanks. This also pushes a notification to the relevant driver’s phone. The thanked driver can also view a sponsored thank you message and receive AT&T data rewards for their courteous behaviour.
The design uses a Konekt dash module that integrates a u-blox SARA-U260 3G cellular modem and a u-blox PAM-7Q GNSS module.
“u-blox has been taking part in the AT&T Hackathon for three years now and we are always delighted to support creative new projects. This year, we are proud to sponsor the driver ‘Thank You’ app that leverages two of the wireless technologies we provide: cellular and positioning. This prototype is an excellent example of application development. It combines different building blocks like modules, cloud-services, data transmission and software into a single design,” says Robert McNish, field application engineer at u‑blox America.
u-blox technical staff were on hand throughout the Hackathon to provide help to contestant developers during the event.
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