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Some of you might be interested in The Hacker Zephyr, a cross-country train hackathon with 42 teenagers from across the world. We worked with Amtrak and an ama
by zachlatta 4y ago
Some of you might be interested in The Hacker Zephyr, a cross-country train hackathon with 42 teenagers from across the world.
We worked with Amtrak and an amazing team of train enthusiasts to get 3 vintage train cars on The California Zephyr’s route across the US. We started in Vermont and ended in Los Angeles, traveling 3,502 miles over 10 days.
Short documentary: https://youtu.be/2BID8_pGuqA https://youtu.be/2BID8_pGuqA
Planning documents and finances are open source at https://github.com/hackclub/the-hacker-zephyr https://github.com/hackclub/the-hacker-zephyr
- chiph 4y agoWith Starlinks new in-motion service you could have really great connectivity on those trips.
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoWouldn't normal cell service suffice as well? Unlike in an RV, you'd presumably never be too far from civilization.
- naturalauction 4y agoI haven't taken this route specifically, but a lot of Amtrak routes don't follow roads and don't have great cell service.
- bombcar 4y agoAlmost all long distance Amtrak routes deviate quite far from civilization. Once you’re out of the cities and away from a highway you get cell pockets.
- walrus01 4y agoIf you can afford a private rail car I'm sure you can also afford a peplink router with dual wan interface, and one of the two way going to starlink, the other to a cradlepoint LTE modem and antenna system for T-Mobile or Verizon.
- thepasswordis 4y agoThis seems unbelievably expensive. How is this funded?
- zachlatta 4y agoWe had a very generous group of donors make this once-in-a-lifetime event possible and entirely free for every teenager on board. The team also really made it happen. It was incredibly difficult to organize, and every person involved went far above and beyond any normal expectation to make the Zephyr so special.
- QuarterReptile 4y agoYou always have a sense of a ton of money sloshing around in these sorts of things; in college we used to get symphony orchestras to fly our group out to collaborate on performances. But, it's a different matter to see it enumerated. For anyone not wanting to read through, I found ~$160,000 in private train car payments, and somewhere around $40,000 in fees and tickets to Amtrak.
- bombcar 4y agoThat’s $5k per kid or $500/day per kid. Not bad at all considering.
- pooper 4y agoI always get the feeling that I am not good with big numbers. Like a public library spending USD 50k+ per month(?) to Oracle seems outrageous to me but I guess it isn't so outrageous given the annual budget is over USD 100M?
- moooo99 4y agoI always feel like Software licenses are a different beast. For example, 300k in Windows license costs might not be mulch out of a 50M budget, but it is much when you think about the fact that these costs could also be zero.
- differentview97 4y agoHow exactly could these costs be 0?
- dmos62 4y agoUse free software?
- notpushkin 4y ago
- smohnot 4y agoThis is super cool. I took a quick look but couldn't see how it was funded... how was it?
- club_tropical 4y agoInsanely cool.