logicline – Hackathon Stuttgart Organizer and Visionary Sponsor 2019

logicline – Visionary Sponsor and ORGANIZATOR – since 7 years

the initial idea of an Hackathon 7 years ago came from our daugther company with around 35 hackers at the first event located in our own office. The following two years the topics at Hackathon Stuttgart have been changing but since 2015 our main topics have been set: IoT, Cloud, Mobile – just like the three important colums of the company itself.

Since 2012 every year the interest from IT-lovers and passionates grew and the event got more and more popular. This year we excpect up to 250 hackers and we are really proud of this development.

But we’re not only proud about this development. We’re also proud to name us the Tech-Geeks from Lenze – our mother company. We love to connect products and machines with the internet with the help of apps developed with cloud-platforms like Salesforce or Heroku. With those apps we support companies on their way to digitalization.

These topics are currently highly relevant and, in our opinion, will continue to be so in the coming years, both for companies and for developers. Some people have to deal with them in the context of digitalisation, others may or want to develop new skills and try out new technologies.

Our guiding principle: We help our customers to master their digital transformation and to be successful with their digital products.

In our „lean & agile“ corporate culture, we are lean and flexibly organized, working in teams and project structures. Most of our projects are in-house, our more than 50 employees are spread across our locations in Sindelfingen, Bremen and India.

logicline belongs to the Lenze Group, a leading automation company for mechanical engineering. Lenze employs around 3,700 people worldwide and is represented in more than 60 countries. Together with our sister company encoway, a leading provider of software solutions for variant management, we form the growing digital pillar of the Lenze Group: Lenze.Digital.

The topics, the organisation, news and everything worth knowing for the participants can be found on the Hackathon’s own website.

Gadgets provided for Hackathon Stuttgart 2019 by logicline:

About our provided gadgets you can read in our blog article. Have fun!

Heroku in a Nutshell

So many teams chose Heroku during the past Hackathons, of course it will be available for this year’s Hackathon as well! Heroku focuses relentlessly on apps and the developer experience around the app. It’s a perfect platform for our Hackathon Stuttgart where speed is in need! Heroku lets you embrace your hackathon project, not the distraction of computer hardware, nor the distraction of servers – virtual or otherwise. By choosing Heroku you have a whole ecosystem at your hands speeding up your hack at the Hackathon Stuttgart. The following should give you an idea what’s it all about.

Check it out before the game begins it might give you the edge over the competition.

Heroku is a PaaS Offering. Key features you are most likely to encounter during your hack are:

Your Heroku App

… consists of your source code, a description of any dependencies, and a profile. It runs on one or more Dynos. Your Heroku App is the entity you configure and operate. In the Heroku Web interface you can set config variables for your application, configure Add-ons to be used, you can deploy your code, set access rights and move your app between the different stages of your development pipeline, if you choose to have one. In addition, you can manage the runtime of your Heroku app by starting, stopping and scaling it.

If you want to know more or even do a short tutorial you can have a look here. Tutorials are not only available in Java of course.

 Dynos

… are isolated, virtualized unix containers, that provide the environment required to run an application. Dynos come in different flavors, you will most likely go with the free dyno type. But beware it falls asleep after 30 min inactivity.  If you have a high workload you can even scale your dynos. There are one to many Dynos per Heroku App.

Heroku Add-ons

… provide you with features you might need in your application but don’t have time to reinvent them yourself, there are more than 150 Add-ons available for you to add with a single klick. The vast majority of these Add-ons come with a free plan, so they are ideally suited for our hackathon. Examples for Add-ons are:

• Data Stores
• Messaging Systems
• Email Systems
• Image and Video processing

Find the whole set here.

Heroku Buttons

… are a great starting point for your hack. They are a one-click provision, configure and deploy third party components, libraries and pattern apps. Choose one that best matches your Hackathon project and start hacking based on one of these templates. If you want to get a short overview take a look here.

Build Packs

… automate the build processes for your preferred languages and frameworks. You can choose between many languages such as Java, Go, Scala, Ruby, Python, NodeJS, … and loads more: Pick your poison.

Be prepared for the Hackathon and look at what’s available here.

Command Line Interface (CLI)

… for those guys who don’t want to put their hands off the keyboard Heroku also provides a command line interface. It allows you to create new Heroku Apps, add the Add-ons you want to use and even manage your App at runtime. Basically, everything you can do in the WebUI. Find Details here.

How to get started?

Heroku offers you great resources online helping you to easily and quickly master the Heroku Platform. This is only a short intro to give you an Idea:

1. signup with Heroku
2. download and install the Heroku CLI
3. implement your app
4. push the app to the remote Heroku git repository to deploy
5. test the app

Look at a Heroku tutorial online. It will walk you through the details in no time and gives you a very good idea how things work.

How to develop my app?

Do the getting started part. App development is the same as usual. Focus on your business logic, integrate the Add-ons (if you use a database Add-on you still must write code to store it there). Working in a team you can use a cloud based git repository such as GitHub. You can even connect Heroku with your GitHub repository and automatically deploy new commits on your HerokuApp. It’s as simple as that.

Support

During the Hackathon you can always as the guys from logicline (red hoodies) to help you with Heroku specific question. We are happy to support!

Resources

We prepared a compilation of links that might be interesting for you before or during the Hackathon.

• The root to all relevant documentation: https://devcenter.heroku.com/
• Getting Started, with java and others: https://devcenter.heroku.com/start
• Know the command line: https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/command-line
• See the Add-ons: https://elements.heroku.com/addons
• Pick your language: https://elements.heroku.com/buildpacks
• Use Template Apps: https://elements.heroku.com/buttons

Crosser 101

This time we offer a new IoT Platform: Crosser

You know nodeRed? Well this is the Industrial grade counterpart 😉

So, why Crosser in the first place:

• Low Learning Curve
• Empower People to innovate: Clickers vs. Coders
• Start Small. Or Big

This is what we need at the hackathon as well!

This is what the creators write about Crosser:

“Crosser is a Streaming Analytics and Integration software for any Edge, On-premise or Cloud. The Crosser Platform enables real-time processing of streaming or batch data for Industrial IoT, Data Transformation, Analytics, Automation and Integration.”

Connect your devices to Crosser Cloud and then visually do: Streaming Analytics, Machine Learning as well as any kind of Data transformations, simply by drawing flows in the Flow Studio Web Application.

The Flow Studio is a drag-and-drop visual design tool where you select and connect pre-built building blocks called modules to develop your flows and the Flow Studio is a central component in Crosser Cloud.

There are three main types of modules, Collector, Compute and Action modules, in a rich and ever-expanding library of modules. There is also an open SDK that allows you to build your own custom modules. Find all the gory details here.

If you want to process data close to the device, use Crosser Node!

The Crosser Edge Node software allows you to collect data from any data source, build automated workflows to transform, analyze, and act on the data and integrate it using pre-built modules and connectors.

Collect streaming and batch data using any Protocol, any PLC/OT system or any Enterprise System. Select from the rich and ever-growing library of standard modules or use the open SDK to easily build your custom collector module.

Process the data in the edge and take actions locally based on advanced business rules or your own ML model or code. Run local triggers with millisecond latency. Connect to Cloud Providers for storage and historical analysis. More infos here.

The bosses of Crosser will be there to help you implementing your solution with crosser. Better support is not possible!!!