Not at the entry price point of a hackathon, which is the point. Using AI in software hackathons are magnitudes cheaper than AI doing manual labor in hardware hackathons.
> Using AI in software hackathons are magnitudes cheaper than AI doing manual labor in hardware hackathons.
Sure: Going all-in on the bot with the hypothetical sorter and pick-and-place delta robot and the soldering machine? That's never going to be cheap.
But one doesn't have to go all-in. The bot (potentially along with an army of subagents) can ingest a goal and a list of parts on-hand and their specifications. Like an army of bots that is instructed to write code, it can sit there and iterate on designs like a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters until it finds one that actually works.
The humans (remember the humans?) can sit back and have a beer while this happens, and then start the physical process of hacking the thing together once the bot gives them direction.
Look at this list of suggested concepts:
- Building a ridiculous Apple II application
- Turning a fax machine into a social media network
- Turning a Game Boy Advance into a Bloomberg terminal
- Making an LLM-driven cash register that can feel love and pain
- An AI voice-activated microwave
If a person can't imagine ways to use the bot for these things, then are they really trying?
