Devlog #5: Funding Cleared, Amazon, and Currency stuff

– From Sep 1st to Sep 15th 2026 –

Today, the funding finally got approved!!!!!!

I woke up to absolute green lights and the best notification ever. Naturally, within 3 hours the money completely evaporated lol 😂. But honestly, two major roadblocks popped up back to back, only for one good fate to come through and overwrite all the stress thank god.

The first headache was payment processing. Future Electronics (who was supposed to be my primary supplier for the Arduino Mega and the main LiPo setup) doesn’t accept card payments. Then RAM Electronics whicj is my second biggest supplier, turned out not to accept foreign cards. Since the grant was issued as a virtual card, that meant zero local offline shops and zero local sites without online gateways.

So I had to pivot entirely to uncle Amazon who is slightly more expensive for a lot of things here, so I immediately googled "177 usd to egp". The conversion hit 9,158.42 EGP (which was wayyy higher than the original 8 grand budget I calculated weeks ago) i thought i’d need to cut corners but thank god the extra grand payed for the price difference!

For the first time in history the EGP dip against the USD actually worked in my favor. I didn’t just cover the costs I was fully prepared to start axing components from the build, but thank God, I didn’t have to cut a single thing. After checking out every single line item the project needed, the card balance is sitting clean at exactly $0.64 USD.

The order log is wild its 43 individual orders totaling 58 pieces, modules, and physical tools. Overall shipping added up to just under 5 bucks. The sheer dopamine hit of smashing that checkout button is still running high because lowkey this is officially the biggest Amazon order of my life. Deliveries start rolling in tomorrow (aka today cuz i still havent slept and its 0450am) and will keep trickling in over the next few days.

We also had to make two crucial hardware adjustments on the fly

The LiPo Swap: The original LiPo battery plan had to go. Future was the only local vendor stocking the specific pack, they’re notoriously hazardous to ship/store, and finding proper balance chargers online locally was an absolute dead end. We’re swapping the primary power delivery to a safer, more accessible Lithium Ion setup.
Card Only Sourcing: As mentioned, because this is an international card grant, any vendor without structured online payment processing had to be swapped out of the supply chain entirely.

I’m currently in the middle of rebuilding and restructuring the entire BOM to reflect the exact Amazon components, specs, and updated unit prices. I’ll push the updated BOM file directly to the GitHub repo as soon as it’s finalized.

Huge thanks again to Jay @ Stardance Hardware for helping clear the administrative loops and getting the grant active! <3

Immediate Action Plan

Unbox and inspect all 58 individual components upon arrival over the next few days
Complete the updated BOM spreadsheet with exact Amazon item links and prices
Push the updated BOM.md and CAD changes to the main GitHub repository
Lay out the real-world bench assembly and start initial power testing