Do you want to make the world a better place with your coding skills? We have an opportunity for you! Together with the associations Code4Change and Plastic Odyssey, we are opening a special track for MiXiT this year. Come and code!

For two days a dozen of volunteers will work on two projects for a charity association. If you are motivated to join the adventure, whatever your skills are, please contact us! We are especially looking for developers knowing embedded software development, C++ and fullstack developers. But don't let that stop you, though. If you know how to code, contact us!

Plastic Odyssey will introduce their projects on Thursday morning and we will have 2 days to build them. On Friday night we will present what we created to the whole MiXiT attendees. The hackathon will take place on the conference site: you will be able to attend to two or three sessions if you would like to. Contact us as soon as possible, and tell us how you would like to contribute!

Plastic Odyssey

Plastic Odyssey is both a human and a technical challenge. For the first time ever an expedition will travel all around the world on a plastic powered 25 meter boat, advocating for recycling at every stop. It will start in 2020 for 3 years on African, South American and Asian shores - which are the most plastic polluted areas - aiming to demonstrate that those wastes have too much value to be dumped in the Ocean. The boat will be a floating workshop teaching plastic recycling with low-tech and open source waste processing machines. At each port of call we will meet local entrepreneurs, communities to find the best way to fight plastic pollution locally, and train locals on how to turn waste into useful objects thanks to the open-source machines. Part of the plastic collected will be turned into fuel to reach our next stop. The technologies we use will be shared to develop local economies while cleaning up the environment.

Theme 1 - Problematic: the current temperature controller is closed-source and expensive

When transforming plastics through recycling or pyrolysis, multiple steps involve temperature control and regulation. Our current controller is closed-source and expensive. We have to develop efficient machines that are cheap and open-source for our project to succeed. The temperature control must follow those principles. We would like to try temperature regulation through an Arduino microcontroller: it seems to be able to do the job and comply with our constraints.

Sought results: to control and report on temperature with an Arduino card

The card should:

• measure temperatures and alert at different thresholds (2 to 8)
• control the temperature through signaling our heat resistance and water cooling systems.
• record activities on a computer. We need to create the code for the card and create a live test on an actual Arduino card.

More info: we will provide an Arduino card, a heating system and a thermometer.

Theme 2 - Problematic: get ready for the trip

Plastic Odyssey is an adventure that requires multiple plastic recycling communities to collaborate. To prepare for the world trip we need to find and get in touch with local contacts in every visited countries. While doing it, we would like to highlight exemplar organisations and inspiring solutions everywhere worldwide. We currently collect information on those solutions through email or direct message. We could be more efficient. Those channels will be of the utmost importance to plan our trip, set up communication channels directly from communities to communities and measure our impact.

Sought results: a tool for sharing information

We would like to create a tool that will allow:

• to help people sharing data, create their own network, and visualize their own impacts
• to welcome new users and guide them to register their information
• to visualize gathered data on an interactive map for internal use (organizing the trip) and external use (communication and highlight of clever recycling solutions)
• to share those data with our community on a map in a dedicated page of our website
• to filter, export and exploit gathered data (ie. mass mailing)

More info: our current website is Wordpress based.

So, we are looking for:

• at least one developer interested in embedded development and C++
• at least one "fullstack" developer
• 6 developers maximum per team.

Contact : Julien Gardette (gardette.julien@gmail.com)