Sngular PGH: the Iron Man Hackathon June 2025

Pittsburgh is known for making real stuff, the steel backbone of America. So it’s only natural that our software engineers love to use their cyberskills to bring innovation off the screen and into meatspace.

On Friday and Saturday, we joined up with our fellow yinzers and remote colleagues to do just that in Sngular PGH’s first hackathon of 2025. We became Tony Stark for a day, programming two robotic arms to do our collective bidding in a project we plan to reuse in our next campaign to save the multiverse.

Read on to see how it went down and what our avengers assembled.

Friday: The Challenge

The hackathon topic was a closely guarded secret leading up to the event date, so at the end of the week, we met at Sngular's downtown office to introduce the challenge (and eat empanadas). Our technical director, Ricardo, issued the call in dramatic fashion: “BRING OUT THE ROBOTS!”

Having armed us with two sets of equipment–a RoArm-M2-S robot arm, a Raspberry Pi controller, and an Arducam–Ricardo gave us our directives: Assemble the robotic arms to be able to control them using the keyboard, and integrate OpenCV to allow the robots to pick up objects. Bonus if we could use other tools, like Huggingface.co Lerobot models and Google Collabs, to do something even crazier.

With that brief intro, we were scheduled to stop there for the evening, but everyone was so excited with our new toys that the office hummed til 9:00 with Sngulars assembling the robots and learning the basics with a drink in hand.

Nerds.

Saturday: The Attack

At 10am, we converged back on the office and divided into two teams, Team A and Team 1. (Together, we’ve got the sauce, am I right?)

Team A decided to go by the book and follow orders, while Team 1 wanted to go rogue and have the robot copy a person’s gestures. Few participants had experience with these devices or with Python libraries like OpenCV to read camera inputs, so both teams began at square one: connect all the pieces and make them talk to one another.

Team 1 cracked the problem using what every web developer knows and loves: inspecting HTTP requests in the browser. The team discovered that each connected robot had a hotspot that could be accessed from the browser, so they used the dev tools to find the requests needed to make the arm move. They found that every request, whether read or write, was a GET. REST fail!

Teams struggled with the realities of physics, repositioning the camera and drawing coordinates on the table to help orient the bots. Fernando Bosch, Sngular PGH’s business development director (and Team A member), said he felt out of his depth on the technical side, but he was happy to contribute at least one useful tip: “how about we raise up the camera from the table so it can actually see stuff?” (Listen, this is why you need your BSA.)

Between moving the arm, reading the camera images, and learning a whole bunch of Python, teams worked all day til 5:30PM with hardly a break. Even when the pizzas showed up for lunch, nobody wanted to stop to eat, said Marco Baez, a Sngular engineering team lead (and Team 1 member).

Determined, vibing, in our lane–we only had time to stuff pizza in our faces and keep moving.

At Last: Victory!

At 5:30 it was time to wrap up, and both teams had a prototype to share.

The robot from Team A picked up a dry erase marker:

And the robot from Team 1 signed “yes” or “no” based on the gestures it saw:

The winner? Well… much like avenging the multiverse, this hackathon was more about collaboration than competition, so prizes were awarded by raffle: an Amazon gift card, a mechanical keyboard, and, for one lucky winner, a gaming laptop.

For the rest of us, we settled for the friends we made along the way. And it really was enough! We mean it.

Roll Credits...

Big thanks to our event organizers Nick Fury (Ricardo Lopez) and Pepper Potts (Marcela Navarro), without whom none of this would have been possible.

P.S. If your project needs a team of engineers that can't stop, won't stop (not even for pizza), contact us here!