2024-03-17

Battlefield of Things Hackathon 2024: our first Belgian Defence hackathon

In March 2024 we joined the first Battlefield of Things hackathon organised by Belgian Defence at Vlasmeer FOB. Here's our aftermovie.

Belgian Army officer briefing participants at the Battlefield of Things IoT Hackathon, Vlasmeer FOB 15-17 March 2024

Jasper Lammens and I participated in the Battlefield of Things hackathon, an event hosted by the Belgian Army at Vlasmeer Forward Operating Base. This was our first time. A year later we'd come back and win the technology challenge with BattAware.

The mission

Detecting border crossings in the rainforest, visualising that data, and connecting the solution to existing command and control systems.

Pre-event I was exploring FreeTakServer, its plugins, and ATAK clients. I was also brainstorming with the hardware people at OnEdgeDev about potential solutions. The ability to inject custom data into a tool like TAK is genuinely exciting. As they say: luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

The venue

Back of a chair at Vlasmeer FOB with KAMP BEVELEN written on it in black marker - army surplus furniture

Inside the hackathon hall at Vlasmeer: military tent setup behind chain-link fencing, folding tables in foreground

Vlasmeer FOB is exactly what it sounds like. Army surplus furniture, military tents inside a hangar, and chairs with KAMP BEVELEN stamped on the back.

The team

Frederik and Koen Ceulemans (in Belgian Army uniform) in front of the Battlefield of Things backdrop

Jasper in Dropsolid sweater helping examine military equipment alongside other participants and soldiers

Mixed team of civilians and Belgian Army soldiers posing together in front of the Battlefield of Things sign outside

The full story

We really wanted to win. We brought a full fab lab and missed a lot of sleep getting everything set up, day and night. This time wasn't for us. Good to keep us sharp.

The tech

The people of onEdge NV created genuinely cool devices: sensors that detect vibrations, signals, people, or nearby devices, then transmit over 2.4GHz FLRC to InfluxDB (a time series database). Similar to what Dries Buytaert described in a recent post, we chose to use Drupal as an IoT backend to query InfluxDB. Sensor management turns out to be surprisingly similar to content management.

The Sensor Management System transmits only the important events to Battle Management Systems such as ATAK. To test the full chain, we set up our own ATAK server. Very few other groups had a working ATAK integration with the entire chain actually running. That was a real achievement.

Open source

Jasper and I are open-sourcing the module to connect Drupal to the Battle Management System. Contributing back is genuinely rewarding.

Thanks

Special thanks to Koen Ceulemans for making this event happen. To Jordy de Hoon from onEdge NV, because we really needed their hardware to run our software. And to Calibrate. Keep sharing, folks.

It was a great first experience. Interesting problem space, great people, and exactly the kind of cross-sector collaboration that doesn't happen often enough. We came back the following year with a clearer idea and a winning solution.