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Hack Atlantic: 43 Student Projects in One Weekend at UNB

More than 110 students built at UNB Fredericton on September 26 and 27. A drone deconfliction tool took first place, ahead of a wearable muscle tracker and an always-on memory app. Other teams watched a much-hit Fredericton overpass and traced wildfire smoke.

Closing card for Hack Atlantic 2026 at UNB Fredericton: one weekend, 110+ hackers, 43 projects, with SkyLattice first, ActivateMio second and Recall third

Hack Atlantic, which bills itself as Atlantic Canada's largest student-run hackathon, brought students to the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton on September 26 and 27, 2026, to build software and hardware. It was an official Major League Hacking event.

The organizers' recap counts more than 200 applications, more than 110 hackers, 43 projects, 13 sponsors and more than $6,000 in prizes. Every entry is in the Devpost gallery, and many link to their code.

The top three

First place: SkyLattice, by Viv Sharma, Manideep and Sarah Mandlekar, won a Nintendo Switch for each team member. It gives drone operators one shared picture of the sky, combining flight plans, live airspace awareness and conflict detection. A human approves any change to a flight path. The team started from the Canadian Army's MINERVA UAS Deconfliction Challenge: as more drones share the same airspace, flights that are safe on their own can clash in location, altitude, timing or radio use. "Great concept, execution and real world use," participant Dweep Saha said in the recap.

Second place: ActivateMio, by Richard Htoo Myat Naing, Kiril Bourakov, Khuss Thakrani and Rostyslav Kolodij, won a monitor for each team member. It is a wearable that reads EMG, the electrical signal muscles give off when they work, and streams it to a phone. The team pitched it to athletes, trainers and physiotherapists, since EMG gear is usually expensive and stuck in a lab. There is a live demo and a GitHub repo. Asked about the coolest build of the weekend, participant Anh Tran answered: "Someone built a wearable muscle tracker … to help spot muscle imbalances, very cool!"

Third place: Recall, a solo entry by Amil Shahul, won a Fitbit Air. It bills itself as "always on contextual memory for your devices." You choose which apps it reads. It reads their text on your own computer, with no screenshots or keystroke logging, strips out secrets, sends the text to your own private cloud memory, then lets you ask plain-language questions such as what you worked on yesterday. AI assistants can read that memory too, once you allow it. The code and a live version are public.

Track winners

  • Best Use of Snowflake: Sim4Food, by Tony Pham, Chris Lin, Phuntsho Wangyal Galay and Jeevaka Weerakoon. It tells restaurant owners how much of each ingredient to order for the coming week. A demand forecast is run through simulations of 300 what-if scenarios, such as deals, holidays and stockouts. The team started from food waste at Fredericton restaurants and cites $58 billion of food lost in Canada every year. GitHub.
  • Dual Use, first: PackFlow, by Amritansh Singh, Samvid Gupta, Rimjhim Sharma and Gana Aathithan. A driver scans parcels, gets a van load plan sorted by stop, weight and fragility, then finds each parcel fast at the door. The idea came from a four-month Purolator courier contract, where one team member watched boxes go in wherever they fit. Live demo and GitHub.
  • Dual Use, second: Smoke or Fire? / Fumée ou feu ?, by Soufiane Amribt. If you smell wildfire smoke, it uses real wind data and NASA satellite fire detections to tell you in about a minute whether the smoke is drifting from a known fire or could be something new. The problem is local: on the morning of August 25, 2025, smoke from Nova Scotia's Long Lake fire, about 159 km away, sent roughly 300 calls to fire departments in Moncton, Dieppe and Riverview. The tool is bilingual and built with seniors in mind. Testing it turned up a side finding: several of the spots where satellites saw heat on the most days in 2025 were the Irving refinery in Saint John, not wildfires. Replay demo and GitHub.

Finalists

  • Thorpe Watch, by Anh Tran, Phát Phan, Kristyn Le and Tran Nguyen Thanh Khoi, is "real-time monitoring for Freddy's most-hit overpass." Trucks keep getting stuck under the Bill Thorpe Walking Bridge on Waterloo Row, and the team calls it "kind of a local meme." The site counts the days since the last hit and keeps a timeline of past strikes. A proof-of-concept ESP32 vibration sensor that could be attached to the bridge would flag new strikes, and subscribers get alerts. The team credits McBroken, the site that tracks broken McDonald's ice cream machines, as inspiration. Live demo and GitHub.
  • CloakFile, by Tariq Almadi and Hazem Adel, removes personal and sensitive information from an uploaded document and exports a clean copy, for example before you paste it into an AI chatbot. Live and GitHub.
  • Eazz Mechanic, by Bharghav Karnati, Aryan Chennupati and Kshitij Jagadish, is a 3D simulator for taking machines apart, with the tagline "Break it. Fix it. Learn it." The first model is a car engine with a 21-step spark plug swap. If you are about to make a mistake, the simulation stops and shows what would have happened to a real engine.
  • Dylamo, by Ryan Siyavudeen, Adhin Joseph, Shifan Pathan and Janav Krtin, lets you phone in from anywhere to direct AI coding assistants running on your own computer. It calls you back only when it needs approval or attention. GitHub.

Other projects in the gallery took on local problems too. Newcomer Navigator, for example, is a guide for people who have just arrived in Canada.

Judges and sponsors

The judges were Jessica Veinotte (investment associate, NBIF), Promise Abel (software engineer, SpryPoint), Yousef Khirallah (formerly of Tesla), Mantas Groza (formerly of Tesla and Zipline), Mike Waugh (founder, Elaras Consulting), Robert Foley (founder, Bluebird Consulting) and Nick McCullum (engineer, SnapTrade).

The gold sponsors were Gray Wolf Analytics, UNB, the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation and SnapTrade. The silver sponsors were Uride, Introhive, Bluebird Consulting, Elaras Consulting, SmartSkin Technologies and NordVPN. MLH, Snowflake and Red Bull were partners.

Tony Pham, whose team built Sim4Food, summed up what he learned: "It's not always about the feature you push, but the message you deliver."

Sources

ChronologyUNB· 42 stories since Nov 20, 2024

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