Hack The 6ix (2025) Recap
QNX had a great time at Hack The 6ix this year in Toronto! Here's a recap of what we saw.
This year the amazing Hack The 6ix hackathon organizers brought over 360 participants to the York University campus for the 11th iteration of their 36-hour event. QNX is proud to have joined as a sponsor for the first time this year, offering a prize for the best use of QNX. The results are quite exciting; read on! (Or here's a short recap video for a peek into the event!)
Across all prize tracks at the event there were 20 winning projects. Interestingly:
- 5 of the 15 projects submitted to the QNX challenge won an event prize,
- 5 of the 20 event winners (25%) used QNX, and
- 5 of the 6 winning hardware projects were built using QNX!
So future participants take note! Using QNX for a weekend project is absolutely possible and can lead to a winning submission!
🏆 Best Use of QNX
The winning QNX submission was written in C, makes use of multithreading, implements thread priorities, reads data from multiple sensors on a single I2C bus, and handles a stream of data off the edge. Congratulations to the creators of Beats By Air: Artin Kiany, Aruzhan Massalina, Jashan Khangura, and Keerath Singh!
Their project uses I2C motion sensors attached to sticks (tree branches!) to create a virtual drum kit. By swinging the sticks to "hit" one of four quadrants around the neutral position, you can trigger a pre-defined drum kit sound. With headphones on, this kit is completely silent!
The team was impressed by their natural talent to navigate complex samples and build environments with very little help. They also attended the QNX workshop and then made good use of the features of the QNX real-time operating system. Well done!
Other QNX Projects
It was certainly not an easy decision to pick a winner – this time QNX saw over 15 submissions to the QNX prize track, and as I mentioned in the intro, many of them were the calibre of winners! Five of the projects went on to win a prize at the event!
In no particular order, here's some of our other favorite QNX challenge submissions (those with a trophy won another prize!):
- wakeruper: a camera-based platform that detects when a driver is sleepy and asks them quiz questions to keep their mind active
- Solari: a project to aid vision-impaired users by sensing the world (with cameras and sensors) and relaying the surroundings audibly
- SAGE: a search and rescue bot intended to seek out casualties in a disaster and to drop off aid packages ahead of emergency services arrival
- 🏆 6ixenality: a personality tool tied to help determine your MBTI type based on some personal and environmental inputs (and it uses RainbowHAT – close to my heart!)
- FightStance: a creative use of a camera and MediaPipe pose detection to encourage physical activity by playing a Street Fighter-like game
- 🏆 Fridge Mind: uses a camera and AI model to determine the contents of a fridge to then get recipe recommendations from Gemini
- 🏆 IntelliDrive: a rover that uses LLM input and camera input to navigate to targets in the physical world
- Revamp: a scalable BMS dashboard to aid in the deployment of used electric vehicle batteries
- InTheMoment: captures moments from your life when it detects you are happy
For the full list of submissions, check out this Devpost filter.
What's Next?
The QNX team took away a huge number of insights to improve our product and our QNX Everywhere initiative. A positive QNX community experience is so important to us – we're actioning these insights to further improve the process of getting started and developing for QNX.
For next events, we'll see you at Hack The North, during September in Waterloo! If you're going, be sure to come say "hi" to me and the team!
Lastly, don't forget you can get started with QNX for free at any time for hobbyist projects, learning, or product prototypes. Find more details here.
Photos of QNX
Here's a small gallery showing some of the QNX team, demos, and projects, taken at the event.
