Last week, our company had the incredible opportunity to sponsor the cuHacking 6 (2025) hackathon at Carleton University – a vibrant and dynamic event organized by students. We got to witness the creativity and ingenuity of so many talented participants and would like to share some highlights from the event and celebrate the winners of our Hardware and Software challenges.

QNX Everywhere at Hackathons

This is the second such event this year for the QNX Everywhere initiative – a push from QNX to open our development platform, tooling, and realtime OS for free to students, researchers, hobbyists, and prototypers.

QNX Everywhere is a great fit for this environment, as it gives everyone the opportunity to hack on an industry-leading platform to gain some in-demand software engineering skills in the embedded software space.

As a proud sponsor of cuHacking 6, we were excited to support an event that fosters innovation and we're grateful to the skilled organizers who helped make QNX available to so many participants.

The QNX Challenges

As sponsors of the event, QNX was able to host some challenges for the participants. Sponsor challenges help drive hackathons by giving a focused stream to the interested teams and by bringing some appealing prizes!

At this event, we hosted two challenges:

• Hardware Focus: create a software project using QNX that drives some hardware components.
• Software Focus: create a software-only project running on QNX.

The winner of each challenge and the runner-up received a prize from QNX, and anyone who attempted one of these challenges using QNX received a Raspberry Pi 4B kit.

Here's a breakdown of each challenge and the winning submissions in each.

Hardware Focus

For this challenge, participants were tasked using any hardware components attached to a physical QNX target (Raspberry Pi 4B) to create a product or example use case.

First Place Hardware Winners

QNXFighter (Devpost link)

Congratulations to the QNXFighter team who took first place! Their project iterated and pivoted through many different attempted implementations before they settled on using the QNX Screen API to draw content on a mini display. They also interfaced with hardware to accept button-press input over GPIO to control the characters on the display.

The QNX judges were impressed with their technical aptitude and resilience in pivoting through several attempted implementations.. And of course the "arts and crafts" vibe (their words) was a cool touch!

Hardware Challenge Runner-up

Plantr (Devpost link)

The plantr team created a well thought out product that helps a user better care for their plants. This project mixed a hardware implementation with an AI-infused back end to create a full-featured product.

The QNX judges were impressed by a number of things: first, the team worked with a hardware sensor for which we had no available sample code, where they ran into trouble but solved each hurdle along the way. Second, the project has a sense of completeness to it, including thoughts on a commercialization strategy, which is an impressive feat for a short weekend hackathon.

Software Focus

For this second challenge, students were tasked with writing some software to run on QNX. This could be a software port, a game, a dashboard prototype, etc.

First Place Winners

QNXtainer (Devpost link)

This team was overflowing with knowledge and passion in the area of bringing containerized applications to QNX! They created a system through which you can use a web app (or equivalent desktop app!) to create a container of source code that would be built, packaged, deployed, and executed on a target. You can then monitor and control the execution of the containerized app remotely.

The QNX judges were very impressed by the technical aptitude that went into this build. It felt very complete end-to-end, and the team invested a lot of time in architecture documentation to explain the system they created. Well done!

Software Challenge Runner-up

RPM - Remote Process Monitor (Devpost link)

The team behind RPM followed a similar track to the first-place winners: they implemented a system to remotely monitor processes running on a QNX target. Using their system you can see the state of all system processes, check in on a specific process, monitor its historical resource usage for anomalies, and then suspend it.

The QNX judges were impressed again by the completeness of this system. For a weekend project it felt well polished and completed.

Conclusion

One of the most rewarding aspects of the event was meeting the brilliant minds behind the projects. The energy at the event was contagious and left us with our own enthusiasm to keep iterating and improving the platform for QNX students.

We are immensely proud to have been part of cuHacking 6 and to have witnessed the incredible talent and creativity of the participants. Congratulations to all the winners and runners-up, and thank you to everyone who made this event a success. We look forward to continuing our support for initiatives that inspire and empower the next generation of innovators.

Find out more about QNX Everywhere at qnx.com and get your free QNX 8.0 license at qnx.com/getqnx.