After this morning’s tense breakfast meeting which saw all three of the PUSH N900 MOD IN THE USA finalists pitching their ideas to the judges and answering their questions, we can now announce the official PUSH N900 MOD IN THE USA winner.

So, without further ado, the judges’ choices are:

1st Prize: Bike Dashboard: winning the cash prize of $10,000!

2nd Prize: Niko: who has been awarded with a $5,000 cash prize

3rd Prize: Pit Crew: who has been awarded with a $3,000 cash prize

The judges were seriously impressed with the ingenuity of all of the hacks: “Seeing what these teams were able to create using the Nokia N900 in just a few weeks time is a true testament to the spirit of human innovation,” said Eddie Hold, Vice President, Current Analysis. “It’s refreshing to see what people can come up with when they are supplied with tools like an open platform – such as the one that the Nokia N900 operates on. Kudos to Nokia and the participants for cultivating this kind of consumer innovation.”

It was no easy feat in selecting just one first prize winner!

People’s Choice Award:: Pit Crew: :winning an additional cash prize of $1000!

The People’s Choice Award has been a hotly contested feature of the official Nokia booth during CTIA, with a host of attendees casting their vote for which of the three finalists’s concepts they think deserves to be crowned the people’s champion. Massive congratulations to Pit Crew for scooping the title and thanks to all the CTIA attendees who cast their votes.

Please join the PUSH team in congratulating all three teams of finalists, in making it to the final and for showing what’s capable with the N900 and their tremendous creativity.

Well, the last week of developing is over and what a week it’s been! We have had some great breakthroughs and we are happy to say that all is done and working great! The bike we ordered for the competition came in just on Tuesday so it was perfect timing. We took it for a test drive and then got to work setting up our mod and seeing how it looks on the bike. It looks pretty awesome. We’re proud. We can’t wait to show it off at CTIA in just a couple days. Wish us luck!

The camera was the most challenging feature to integrate. As other teams, we had problems with gstreamer, but after many days of working, re-working, searching for help (thanks everyone!) and a few nights of sleeping on it we figured it out! Now, there is a preview display on the Bike Dashboard’s UI and it takes a nice picture.

Though nothing we did ended up being quite as simple as we had hoped, it was great to program on/for the N900! We’ve definitely learned a ton and feel like we’re already winners. We’ll post a video from the conference showing it all working. In the meantime, here’s a video after our last test ride:

It’s been a long and busy weekend and we have made some progress. We figured out how to mount the N900 to the bike! We took a bike reflector and Brett used a dremel to cut away certain pieces. This helped it fit better onto the N900 phone case we attached it to. The piece originally intended to mount the reflector was attached to the back of the N900 phone case so you can just slide it right on when you’re ready for a bike ride. Here’s a video of Brett using the dremel:

Here’s a video of Sarah demonstrating how the N900 will slide on to the mount:

Brett and I are almost done with the Bluetooth feature and we’ll be updating you on that soon.

Hey Everyone! BrettSarahtops is working away at the Bike Dashboard and having lots of fun. We’ve recently received a lot of the parts we ordered in the mail, so that has helped us get moving on the Bike Dashboard. We’ve been programming the arduino for the lighting feature of our design and it’s working great so far! Now we just need to get it connected to the N900. We’ve also made progress on the speedometer/odometer. We even made a video about it. Check it out:

We’ve ordered more supplies and we’re waiting for those to come in the mail. In the meantime, we’re staying busy on the other features.

BrettSarahtops here—after much research and debate, we’ve decided to begin programming in Python and use Qt designer for our GUI. It ended up working really well! For all those of you out there on the internets thinking that programming on the N900 is too hard, think again! We’re not total noobs, but this is all new for us and so far things are running smoothly. So get inspired and make something awesome! Look what we’ve done in just a few hours: we’ve already created our rough draft of the GUI and it’s working with PyQt.