ICCX Build-a-Thon Challenge 2

Corso Systems made the cut after the first round of challenges, and was one of ten teams participating in round two of the Build-a-Thon Challenge for Inductive Automation’s ICC X in the fall. Reminder: this year’s setup is different, it started with 20 integrators. After Challenge round 1, the top 10 scoring integrators moved to Challenge round 2. The top 5 will continue to Challenge 3. From there (presumably) the top 2 scoring teams will move on to the final round at the Ignition Community Conference ICC in September.

We continued the second round using our usual remote collaboration methods: Google Hangouts and Slack, with an Ignition development gateway running in the cloud. Individual team members had browsers at the ready along with Jupyter Notebooks, Ignition Script Console, various online decoders/encoders, and more. The first round was very much a puzzle/riddle based game, so we were not sure if the second round would be completely different or in the same format. We wanted to be ready for anything.

Let’s get into the second round! *Spoiler alert: Once again, we are only sharing the questions, while leaving out all of the answers in case Inductive Automation releases the challenge to a broader audience at some point.

The Build-A-Thon Challenge 2 Setup

The second stage of the Build-a-Thon challenge continued the Inductive Automation office tour theme with all new stops. Once again, each stop on the tour began with a photo and an associated challenge. The route for stage 2 is shown below with the various icons indicating each challenge. As we completed the challenges, the map displayed each teams’ location. As before, we received 500 points for completing a challenge, and the first team to complete all 10 got 10,000 points. The overall points awarded were reduced by 500 points for each subsequent finisher, with a Superchallenge at the end worth an additional 600 points.

Ignition Build-a-Thon Challenge Stage 2, Round #1

This first stop on the tour was a room full of bicycles. We were then greeted with a simple riddle - almost too simple! We figured it out faster than we could type it in, and grabbed our first 500 points.

Round #2

Next we’re invited to run up the stairs while imagining wearing a winner’s jacket. Round #2 was a riddle that required us to get out our encoder/decoder rings. After hearing team members Andrew and Hannah discuss the possibilities, new hire, Adrienne, encoded then decoded the strings to find the answer - which at first looked odd, but others recognized was the answer!

Round #3

Much to our surprise and horror, the third challenge loaded as a blank page - but the timer kept ticking! We had to hit the “Enter” button before it would load the question! Fortunately, we made up for lost time as Corso Systems founder, Alex knew the answer right off the top of his head!

Round #4

Round four continued with another seemingly mysterious string of characters. Fortunately, our decoders were at the ready and a team member who has spent way too much time online quickly recognized the percent signs as denoting special characters in a URL. According to the timer, we completed this challenge in under a minute!

Round #5

Much like round five in the first round of challenges, we needed to download a zip file to get started. Unfortunately, because we only had one session for our company, one person had to download it, then they quickly pasted it to our Slack. The script was cleverly shaped into the Ignition logo much like a calligram or concrete poem. With the help of the team and a hint or two, our scripting experts including Andrew, Bill, and Hannah quickly determined what needed to be done to grab the code!

Round #6

The next stop on the Challenge “tour” was the Inductive Automation Sales division, where we were presented with a database query in need of our help!

Round #7

As a remote team collaborating online with only one connection, this scrambled image puzzle presented us with an extra challenge. Fortunately, Marguerite bravely stepped up and knocked this one out… even though Chrome wasn’t allowing her to share her screen (and she also had to tolerate us constantly asking for updates). Extra points for Marguerite, please!

Round #8

We were relived to get back to a shared screen!

Round 8 got interesting as we had to find the words in that newspaper, then determine the right tag and the right date range to view the winning code to get to the next round! At this point we were thrilled to be in third place for finish the current race to the finish!

Round #9

Round nine was a maze with a brutally quick 11 second timer - we had to find the right route with no faulted valves to complete this challenge - another difficult one for our remote company, but we got it done!

Round #10

Round ten required a lot of serious scrolling around in a map - we had to first find Inductive Automation’s headquarters, then our own headquarters—and those of other integrators too—in order to get all the letters for a word scramble. Scott was our fast clicking brave driver, so we quickly got the needed letters to get the code.

Once we submitted this final code we were awarded our 14,000 points! That put us in 3rd place for the race through Round 2, and overall after the Superchallenge (which no one was able to complete) in a tie with Barry-Wehmiller Design Group who also has a matching cumulative total of 27,100. So, we’re still in the game for round three in two weeks.

Now, about that Superchallenge…

Superchallenge

The super challenge is supposed to be difficult. Round 1’s was pretty tough. Round 2’s was so tough NO ONE solved it!

Kevin McClusky was kind enough to share the answer with us the next day and to say we were even more confused was an understatement. Not at the actual solution, that made perfect sense. We were confused that each valid “clue” to the solution made it seem like we were headed down the wrong path. When dealing with text encoding/decoding, you would expect there to be something readable if you have it right then some gibberish to show you it isn’t 100% solved yet. This one required some creative thinking about the gibberish, decoding a couple parts of the string, then solving a pictograph to get the code.

Engineers sometimes get a little too clever for their own good. This is one of those times.

Takeaways

As with round 1, speed is key for this challenge. Speed doesn’t necessarily correlate to building innovative and interesting things in the final round, but it is easy to measure. We hoped round 2 would involve building something, but it sounds like all 3 rounds are going to be these escape room style challenges.

There certainly were some fun ones, the split container article/word highlighting was an interesting use case along with the trend annotations. We were also able to leverage our over a decade of Ignition experience with a solid trivia question! That said this is a Build-a-Thon, not an Escape-Room-a-Thon so building SOMETHING would be wonderful.

If we make it to the final round, great. But, if we don’t, it’s been an interesting and fun ride. We’ll cheer on whoever has the best and most inclusive marketing campaign this year, as last year’s left a lot to be desired on that front.

Check back in a couple week’s for our review of round 3!