Well, i’ve just got back from a weekend gadgeteer hackathon donw in Southampton.
What a great weekend it was too. The brief was to come up with a way to monitor bee hives in a cost effective way. We first evaluated an empty bee hive and met a local bee expert who gave us a ton of info and also took us to see a live hive. Its surprising how annoyed bees get when you take the lid off and it cold!!
We then split into three teams to build a working solution based on the general design which was the kit would sit inside the hive on the back of the end board (a board that keeps the combs close together which makes bees happy as they don’t like lots of space).
All three teams came up with similar solutions in terms of what to measure but the end results were surprisingly different. One team had a really nice solution for using bluetooth and a windows phone to allow for you to walk up and monitor the hive condition, and another team had a great solution which posted the data to a graphite graphing service to show the last weeks temp and humidity changes over the previous day/week etc.
The team i was in went for a solution that logged the data to an SD card for Temp, Humidity, time (from GPS) etc (just like everyone else) but we added a second spider kit and a couple of @ Justins RF Pipe modules. This gave us an at a glance view of the hive status in real time. There are a few pics of the UI below.
@ Justin even managed to get down (a fairly long trip for him) which was great as i finaly got to meet him and discuss a few ideas.
All in all a great weekend. More info and pics here Login to Meetup | Meetup
Thanks to all the guys at Devsouthcoast for organizing this and thanks to Steve Johnston (Microsoft Research PM on the .NET Gadgeteer projec) for supplying the prizes.
MY team won by the way!! A full spider kit each and some extra goodies, top stuff.
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Looked like a lot of fun and pizza 
gratz for the victory! (i’m sure this was subordinate to the pleasure)
Very cool! We have a number of hackathon weekends in Nashville where we pick a charity and build them a website or we just spend a weekend on some idea. Some of these have turned into their own startups and are hiring people! This is a great idea to do this with hardware also. I think NashMicro will be organizing one of these next year 
Looks like it was a blast.
Really enjoyed the Sunday and was pleasantly surprised how well it was organised and run.
Great fun to see 15 people making a real world application with Gadgeteer goodies.
As Hugh said, great to finally meet face to face and talk shop