Overview
Our team secured first place at the AQL Smart Cities IoT Hackathon at the University of Huddersfield. The competition was an intense, hands-on experience tackling real-world IoT challenges, from data ingestion and schema consistency to dashboards and alerting.
Reference post: LinkedIn
Team and Roles
- Team members: Haashim Akbar, Masif Muhammad Virk, Kurtis Perry, Oliver Atherton
- My role: Led the team to ensure clear task ownership and delivery. Focused on building data pipelines, designing dashboards, developing automation scripts, and contributing to the web interface.
Stack
- Python and Node.js for data processing and automation
- Docker for containerised services
- InfluxDB for scalable time-series data storage
- Grafana for dashboards, visualisation, and alerting
Challenges We Tackled
- Real-time ingestion from simulated city sensor feeds
- Normalising inconsistent payloads and enforcing schema rules
- Designing intuitive Grafana dashboards with actionable insights
- Building automated guardrails for alert thresholds and reducing false positives
Results
- Completed 12 challenges and earned 11 bonus points
- Delivered an operator-friendly dashboard with clear, actionable alerts
- Produced well-documented and reproducible solutions (Docker Compose + Makefile targets)
- Demonstrated strong collaboration, leadership, and rapid problem-solving under time pressure
Gallery
Thanks
A huge thank you to the organisers, mentors, and AQL for creating such a valuable learning environment. This experience not only strengthened my technical skills but also gave me the chance to lead a high-performing team and push the boundaries of what we could achieve in just a short time.