About the competition
TrackTech: CSS Hackathon 2026 is a hackathon organized by CPU CSS, challenging students to create educational or innovative projects inspired by cars, motorsports, transportation, or racing systems.
Teams of five had three weeks to develop their projects, which could range from road safety applications to automotive simulations to racing-themed educational games. On demo day, each team got 10-15 minutes to pitch and demonstrate their work before a panel of judges.
How it turned out
Champion out of 7 competing teams with our project Manobela
Our project
We built Manobela, a real-time driver monitoring system that detects unsafe driving behaviors using only a phone camera. The system watches for drowsiness, distraction, phone use, and other dangerous behaviors, then alerts the driver immediately.
Our poster
We also designed a promotional poster for the competition to effectively communicate its purpose and key details.
My experience
This was our team’s first time building something with WebRTC and real-time computer vision, let alone a mobile app, which made the three-week timeline challenging. We spent the first week just getting the detection pipeline working reliably.
The biggest hurdle was performance. Our initial deployment to Render’s free tier didn’t work at all. We had to move to Azure App Service mid-development just to make live monitoring usable. Even then, a locally run backend was still faster, so we planned to use that for the demo instead.
The night before demo day, we panicked when the connection wouldn’t establish in the APK build. It turned out the fix was only a one-line config change after hours of debugging :)
Despite the stress, the demo went well. The judges were particularly interested in the app itself (specifically our computer vision implementation). They also asked about the future of the app, making recommendations like B2B business models that we hadn’t really considered before.
The three weeks taught us more about shipping software under pressure than any course could. We learned to prioritize ruthlessly, debug across conditions we couldn’t control, and present technical work without losing the audience in implementation details.
Check out the full project at github.com/popcorn-prophets/manobela or try the demo at manobela.vercel.app.