The second HackIllinois, held from Feb. 27 to March 1, welcomed 900 hackers, 180 projects and 55 sponsors to the University.

The three-day technology-based competition started by dividing candidates into teams, said Event Director Nick Kortendick. Within 36 hours, team members created a technical project either according to a sponsor’s request or based on their own idea.

Projects were divided into hardware and software categories. Some of the 180 projects presented include an app for geographic exploration, software for stock trading and a flying device for coffee delivery.

Prizes were awarded on Sunday to VR Spec, Pintalk and Teleport for the software category and Oculus Scooter, Cloud Scout and Button Light for the hardware category. Projects were judged based on their creativity, complexity, accessibility, utility and “awesomeness.”

“We are really interested to see people combine multiple technologies together,” said Greg Baugues, a VIP judge and developer evangelist at Twilio, Inc. “But sometimes people are doing too much and trying to include too many features in. It’s better to focus on two to three features and do those really, really well.”

Adam Barbato, a computer science major, joined this year’s HackIllinois with three teammates. They were placed in the hardware category and worked on a flying device, called “RoBarista,” which aims to deliver coffee by remote control.

“I put some coffee onto the croc-copter, which will fly to the coffee table. And then I give it a command, it will pour the coffee into customer’s cup and then return to me,” Barbato said.

More than 2,500 students applied for HackIllinois, and around 900 hackers attended. Preparation began in July 2014 and more than 60 staff members and 225 volunteers participated, according to Kortendick.

Hackers this year came from universities all over the country, including University of Chicago, Missouri University and as far as University of Waterloo, Carnegie Mellon University and Georgia Tech University.

“We feel like it’s best to include a huge variety of people of all different schools, skill levels and backgrounds. That’s why we randomly picked around 1,000 hackers from the applications,” said Nathan Handler, event co-director.

[email protected]