Man, what a good idea. I participated in my first hackathon a few weeks ago and came in second place much to my and my teammates' surprise and delight. We were using a company's smart home technology. The first place team made an app that tracks utility usage by room so as to divide the bill fairly between roommates at the end of each month. Such good ideas come out of these events.

Hey OP, how would you describe the startup culture in Brazil? I've been thinking of spending some time in São Paulo/Brazil working on personal projects. But, have no idea where to go and if there are other sw and/or hw developers hacking away.

Brazil is years behind the US in terms of startup culture. There are very few promising startups, even fewer experienced investors, and to top it all the bureaucracy is terrible. Just consider that you would need to wait between 30 to 60 days just to get your business license.

Not coincidentally my goal is to move to the US as soon as possible.

That all being said, there are also some opportunities here. The country is huge (200+ million), so the internal market is big enough to fuel a startup growth. Second, quite often it's possible to merely clone something that is working in the US here. Some people did that with Groupon, for instance, and they made a lot of money.

Feel free to send me an email if you decide to come here. I'll be glad to show you around (contact details on my profile).