On the 3rd of December, 2022 our postgraduate studies programme, with the support of the Data & Web Science Laboratory of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the RAINBOW H2020 project, organized successfully a hackathon activity in the topic of “Building optimized IoT applications for distributed environments”. The activity was addressed to undergraduate and master students as well as PhD candidates of the Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. In total 16 participants formed 5 groups of 2-4 members, which worked together as a team during the competition.
At the beginning of the activity, the students were introduced to IoT technologies, their respective applications and to RAINBOW’s Fog Computing platform that provides a solution beyond the-state-of-the-art for the deployment and management of cross-cloud applications.
Then, they were provided with a hands-on tutorial of the Docker ecosystem and a demonstration how containerized applications are implemented. In the first part of the hackathon, the participants utilized an IoT application scenario concerning the management of energy consumption data in a distributed environment such as a fog network.
The teams had 2 hours to code their application in the language of their choice (Python being the participants’ choice) to implement their business logic for the fog node and the cloud service parts. In the next step the participants had 1 hour to build the respective docker images and deploy them in specially-prepared virtual machines that fulfilled the roles of fog nodes and the cloud. The fog nodes provided to the participants were running the RAINBOW data management stack with the data monitoring and storage services in place. The outputs requested included some basic data analytics and the detection of possible outliers among the captured measurements.
While building, deploying and testing their solution the competing teams had to plan their approach so as to satisfy the main challenge which dictated the exploitation of the fog resources in an optimum way in order to minimize the data exchange with the cloud services. In the final phase each team presented and demonstrated live their solution. The winning team, a group of 4 undergraduate students in their final year of studies, was chosen based on the results of the demonstration and the quality of the developed solution. All participants received a Raspberry Pi Pico W, a popular low-cost platform for IoT projects, while the best solution won a full Raspberry Pi 400 kit.
During the activity experienced researchers Theodoros Toliopoulos, George Vlahavas, Anna-Velentini Michailidou and Vasileios Psomiadis from the Data & Web Science Laboratory (Datalab) supported the participants. The teams were encouraged into developing their own unique solutions by tackling any technical barriers after they have understood the scope and the potential of the offered tools and technologies. Students benefitted by being introduced to the complete pipeline of the development and deployment of modern IoT applications while getting themselves familiarized with the use of docker technology and with an advanced data management stack for handling data processing in distributed topologies with limited resources, such as Fog networks.
