In May of this year, the HPE Customer Technology Center (CTC) in Böeblingen, Germany held its first HPE hackathon. The event brought together a group of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) developers and designers from IoT & Data Analytics, Presales, Pointnext services, and certain delivery groups who wished to become more knowledgeable about Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) implementations. Noticing that the more concrete IoT and AI projects became, the harder it was to find enough proficient resources to handle them, the group planned a hackathon that could help multiply the knowledge base.

Hackathons can help build proficiency by going beyond PowerPoint presentations and getting down into the finer details to determine how the technology really works. The group locked themselves away for a week to learn more about these topics. To focus their efforts, they defined two projects to work on using HPE technologies; one covered data pipelining and the other covered data analytics.

Data Pipeline with HPE OTLink

The scope of the first project was to set up a data pipeline, from data acquisition to analytics. It was set up to gather data from multiple and different types of devices, including temperature and humidity sensors, Philips ® Hue light bulbs, door sensors, and edge hardware. The data was acquired using HPE Edgeline systems with HPE OTLink software and sent to a dashboard in the Azure cloud using open-source data pipeline services. In a second step, we established bi-directional communication to execute commands from the cloud at the edge.

Data Analytics Provisioning and Analytics with HPE BlueData

The second project set up a BlueData software stack on an HPE Apollo infrastructure including NVIDIA GPUs to provision multiple services from a marketplace that were used for further data science work. The team implemented an image recognition service that enables users to recognize different server options, such as fans or hard drives, by video. The image below shows the overall architecture and it’s something that could be applied to a midsized manufacturing customer.

The CTC group spent a lot of time coding, and enjoyed the opportunity to work with one another and share their knowledge. They felt that it was truly worth the time and effort. Because they found it so successful, they are hoping to hold a similar event the third week in January 2020 and are thinking of inviting select partners to participate.

If you’re interested in learning more, connect with Florian Doerr at florian.doerr@hpe.com or @florian_doerr. For more opportunities to work with HPE DEV, connect with the HPE Developer Community on the HPE DEV Slack channel. And don’t forget to monitor the HPE DEV blogs to hear more about what’s going on in the HPE DEV world.