Hack Pompey  x  Sea Change
Hacking for our City

On March 29th, we opened the doors of the Future Tech Centre at the University of Portsmouth for Hack Pompey x Sea Change – a hackathon collaboration between yours truly and Sea Change.

Our keenest hackers arrived as early as 8:15 AM^*, eager to nab their free T-shirts and breakfast before diving into a day of creativity, problem-solving and collaboration.

^*It’s worth noting that doors opened at 9 AM. That said, we were most grateful for the extra hands during setup!

What is Sea Change?

The Sea Change project is an initiative focused on establishing a shore power system at Portsmouth International Port, enabling visiting ferry and cruise ships to use green electricity instead of running their engines on traditional fuel while docked. The project aims to significantly reduce harmful emissions, with an estimated saving of over 20,000 tonnes of CO2e annually from 2027, and establishes Portsmouth International Port as a leader in sustainable maritime technology.

Throughout the lifetime of the project, the Sea Change partners have gathered a great deal of data with regards to shipping and emissions activity around the port. At Hack Pompey, our participants were tasked with transforming that dataset into something that could inform and benefit the citizens of Portsmouth, leading to a happier, healthier city.

What did people work on?

Over 70 hackers with diverse backgrounds and skills tackled ideas and challenges from Sea Change and Hack Pompey, each team adding their unique and often humorous spin to the theme.

After taking into account the opening talk, breakfast and lunch, teams had only 6 hours to take their projects from idea to completion – a tall order! In spite of this, we were so impressed with what our participants were able to achieve. Near the event’s end, a selection of teams presented their projects to the rest of the hackers during the Show & Tell.

This year, teams that presented were eligible for a few more awards alongside our People’s Choice Award, but before diving into the winners, we wanted to highlight a few standout projects that were also presented:

Terror of the Seas

Liam F, Lou H, Hugo C, Konstantinos V and Abdullah H

A higher-or-lower game built with an Arduino and designed to engage and inform younger generations of just how worrying the issue of air pollution could really be. The player is shown a value on a display representing the carbon particulates per million a boat may emit when berthed, the player then decides if the actual amount is higher or lower than that. Using an LED and buzzer combo to feedback right or wrong answers, the player learns very quickly that the amount of carbon particulates is always higher than one thinks.

Runtime Terr0rs

Ethan E, Ollie G, Jack R and Theo K

Returning for their second Hack Pompey, the Runtime Terr0rs transformed the raw environmental data provided by the Sea Change team into an excellent human-friendly dashboard that aimed to make the data accessible and understandable to the people of Portsmouth. What the Terr0rs were able to do in the short amount of time available to them was particularly impressive. You can learn more about the project on the team’s GitHub page.

Portal Kombat

Robb Knight

Another Hack Pompey regular, Robb took all of the ship data provided by Sea Change and built Portal Kombat, a “Top Trumps”-like game. The player is shown two boat cards with the real boat data points visible on the first, and a genuine photo of the boats on each. The player then has to select the datapoint on the first card that they think is higher than the datapoint on the other card which is hidden. If the player selects the higher datapoint, they win! Play continues until the “Yacht or Not?” bonus round, which we’ll leave to your imagination. Robb has done his own write-up which goes into further detail.

The Lonely Dashboard

Leon NG

Leon made a dashboard showcasing outputs from his predictive machine learning models that were trained on the Sea Change data. During his presentation Leon expressed how he was hoping to achieve even more than that but considering he was solo-running the hack, we think he did extraordinarily well to get as much done as he did. At the end of his presentation he ran through some of the things he learned at Hack Pompey, including to “dream smaller” next time, but we reckon with a couple of team mates he could have reached his goals, so perhaps the old adage of “Together Everyone Achieves More” is something to carry into the next hack.

Celebrating Innovation — The Awards!

At the end of the event, we recognised the hard work and ingenuity of our participants with several awards chosen and presented by Sea Change and Hack Pompey, alongside the audience favourite with the People’s Choice Award.

The Sea Change Awards

Ahoy World!

Michael P, Aisha K and Sam B

This clever project used a “gaussian plume model” to calculate and show how pm25, pm10, and pm1 particles diffused over the city of Portsmouth on a given day by combining the emissions and wind data provided by Sea Change.

The Sea Change team considered this an excellent and genuinely useful utilisation of the data. Well done Ahoy World! (and also, from programmers everywhere, kudos on the project name).

See the project in action or read Michael’s write-up.

Maritime Meridian

Dominic VS, Ben L and Nikos P

The Maritime Meridian project brought together multiple real-time data sources to project environment and traffic information onto a map of Portsmouth. Using the map, residents of Portsmouth are able to find optimal cycling or running routes to avoid high-pollution or congested areas. It also brought in shipping data so that residents could identify when ships were entering the harbour for their viewing pleasure. Checkout the project on Github.

The Hack Pompey Award

HaNiPaSci

Hadiseh R, Nikos P, Samuel B and Paige

For us, HaNiPaSci represented the spirit of the hackathon as a team formed from complete strangers that met in the morning. HaNiPaSci went on to do some impressive number crunching using machine learning to process the Sea Change datasets with the intent of surfacing which data points were of interest to the everyday person, and drawing appropriate correlations and findings throughout. The information was presented in a very-nearly-working dashboard. We know that with a smidge more time they would have got that dashboard working, and to us they had already achieved an amazing amount within the day. Well done HaNiPaSci!

The People’s Choice Award

PIP (Portsmouth Independent Party)

Kieran S, Jeet C, Dillon C, Brendan S, Nikhil T

PIP, the People’s Choice, used the Sea Change data to classify real ships into two simple categories based on their emissions output that, via a web interface, traffic controllers at the Portsmouth International Port could use to quickly determine if a ship met the required low-emissions standards for berthing at the port. High-emission ships would be directed to Southampton in a brutally effective move to improve air quality in Portsmouth. Second order consequences were not considered.

PIP lifted the locally famous People’s Choice Award Trophy this year, joining previous winners in the slowly growing Hack Pompey Hall of Fame. They led the award-winning teams to lay claim to some of the items on our new “rewards table”. The rewards available included a Lego Mars Rover, a Wacom One Drawing Tablet, Raspberry Pi 5, a Rave Coffee gift set complete with Aeropress and KeepCup, and many more!

Hack Pompey’s objective is to inspire all ages to pursue their ideas through to fruition, experience the joy in collaborative problem-solving and to foster self-belief within the hackers that attend our event. We feel that Hack Pompey 2025 x Sea Change was able to do just that and we want to thank all of the hackers who joined us – you all did so well and we hope you all go on to do even greater things in the future.

The Hack Pompey team would like to give a big thank you to the Sea Change team at the University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth International Port, B4T and other partners, and also to the UK Taxpayer that funded the great work Sea Change is doing. We hope that the projects worked on at Hack Pompey might beget further ideas and improvements to our city, and at the very least provide a celebratory “cherry-on-top” to the excellent work achieved by the Sea Change project.

Finally, this event wouldn’t be possible without our excellent team and volunteers. A huge thank you to Roxana Esmaeili, Waleed Sohail, Louise Johansson, Hannah Kenyon, Tom Apter, Florence Hutchins, Charlotte Simonsen, Sage Ralph, Jack Travis and Ming Wu, (and a humble pat on the back for ourselves, Ryan Thickett and Tom Hewett).

Thank you all, Hack Pompey will return!

P.S. If you want to see a few more photos of the day, check out this drive.

P.P.S. If you were at Hack Pompey and you’d like us to link to your socials or your projects, email us at contact@hackpompey.co.uk and we’ll update the page accordingly, or send us a message on Discord.

P.P.P.S. Sometimes it’s hard for us to see the no-photo wristbands. If we’ve published a photo of you when we shouldn’t have, sorry about that, please let us know and we will remove it.

What is Hack Pompey?

Hack Pompey is a FREE social hackathon that takes place every spring at the University of Portsmouth.

We welcome people from all backgrounds and disciplines to join us, learn something new, and build something awesome together!

What can I build?

Anything that is on theme!

People typically collaborate on solving problems, or work on an idea like a new product, service or game.

We know how daunting coming up with ideas can be though, so we’ll make things a little easier by setting a theme to help get your brain ticking.

Do I need a team?

We believe that people have the most fun and build the best things when they work together.

If you don't yet have a team, don't worry! There will be plenty of opportunity to form a team at the event.

Some other things

• Community over contest
  Everyone is welcome, we care about this being a safe and fun environment.
• Free food and drink
  Breakfast, lunch, snacks are provided. We gotta keep you fueled throughout!
• Bring your tools and equipment
  Laptops, craft supplies, pen & paper, Raspberry Pis. Whatever you need for your hacking/making!
  
  Note: the use of soldering equipment or any other equipment that can cause damage to furniture or materials at the venue are not permitted. If in doubt, please contact us before the event.

Here’s what previous hackers had to say about Hack Pompey

“I felt immediately welcomed and inspired by the energy and creativity of everybody involved.” – Dan Branch

“Being able to ask someone ‘how do they do that’ and then being able to have a go has been invaluable to my business’s research & development.” – Helen Goss

“When I went the theme was Sustainability. My team’s project was Deathlaser, a browser-based game about destroying blocks which, in my opinion, is about as sustainable as it gets.” – Jack Travis

Fancy a longer read? Check out these post-event write-ups from the community

My First Hackathon by Michael Parker “I want to start by saying Hack Pompey was an absolute blast – thank you so much to the Hack Pompey team and Sea Change for putting this together. I'm writing this two weeks later, so I may have forgotten a few minor details, but this is how I won...”

The Power of Innovation by Andrew Zak “Very occasionally, Loadbalancer lets me out into the real world. Madness, I know. And the break from the office to participate in this local hackathon was just what the doctor ordered...”

Blahbarian by Zoe Aubert “We didn't know what we wanted to do and were hoping to find some inspiration when we got there. In the office, we have a Blahaj, and it's been the centre of a few shenanigans. In a moment of inspiration, I came up with the idea of...”

If you have any other questions, please drop us a line at contact@hackpompey.co.uk or reach out on social media.