Log No.5 of the 25/26 Hungarian National Engineering Olympiad

It's been a while. Devlog time!

The first thing that pissed me off in this grand 2026, is FreeStaticMaps API seemingly just seizing to exist. I tried to request a map in my app and got an error. At first I thought CloudFlare was down again, but I checked and the both their own site and the RapidAPI site of them completely disappeared. Without a trace. I can't even find any personal contact info on waybackmachine, and I won't even bother trying the official email of the project. So, as much as that more confused than angered me, I had to switch to mapbox. It was harder to setup than FreeStaticMaps because of the long request URL and different encoding, but I got it working and it's significantly more faster than FreeStaticMaps. Still, I wonder what happened.

I changed the code of the PIC and now instead of HEX, it sends regular numbers to represent current draw. I also added some dummy samplings to give the sampling capacitor more time to stabilize. That's all I've got on that, honestly. Took a while to figure out converting integers to chars, but then it turned out that I can use C libraries and the compiler will handle it.

I finally finished the full schematic of the PCB, routed all of it in 4 days and just ordered it from JLCPCB. I'Il include a picture of it here and one when it arrives. It looks hella cool IMO. It was also... not very cheap.

I've been having a bunch of problems trying to get the python to write to and the JS to read from the json that I'm putting the serial data in, I tried a bunch of things, then tried using tempfiles and renaming them, but it didn't wanna put it in the right directory, etc. So now I'Il just be using websocket. "Why not flask???" I hear you asking. Well, because I need the JS to read when I want it to and because flask is acting up in my venv, which I'm too lazy to try and figure out. Still don't have websocket fully setup, but it's close, I can feel it (it's definitely very far but why be negative when you can just gaslight yourself?)

That's all I can think of right now, sorry for the short segments. The length of this post doesn't make it seem as such, but I've gotten a lot done in this past month.

TTZ

Low quality pic but deal with it (around 110x140mm board if I recall well):