Inspiration
Wordle was a clear source of inspiration, and the rest of the idea came from a desperation for any signs of creativity. We saw ridiculous spins on the Wordle concept such as passWORDLE which are pretty unachievable to do, but fun as a concept, so we thought we'd do something similar to that, but with a variation we hadn't seen yet. Of course, the obvious next spin is UK vehicle number plates.
What it does
You can go right now to (dailyvehicle.tech)[http://dailyvehicle.tech] and play our game. It's mainly just light 'entertainment' really. You guess 7 alphanumeric characters at a time trying to match a number plate and you have 6 guesses. Maybe just enough to get it right, with the right strategy, or maybe not.
How we built it
- Webscraping DVLA for vehicle number plates.
- node.js backend server built with express.
- client facing webpage with additional js etc.
- deploying during development and for 'production' to heroku from github
- configuring a domain with domain.com pointing to our heroku project
Challenges we ran into
Couldn't access DVLA API in time
Produced a web scraping programme instead, designed to emulate filling out the form in a real browser.
Rate limited by DVLA
Supplemented our data set with number plates of corporate vehicles (e.g. buses) to ensure enough variety in gameplay.
CSS is a nightmare
ngl, css is not our strongpoint, but we learnt a lot from trying to make this project look as good as we could within the time while also developing the rest of the project.
CORS
We couldn't set up the domain exactly as we liked without purchasing a SSL certificate because of CORS, but this wasn't a major issue.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Producing a fairly polished project and deploying it successfully.
What we learned
selenium for web scraping
basic css animation
setting up a custom domain with heroku
What's next for Vehicle
We might finally buy an SSL certificate for our free domain courtesy of domain.com at some point. Expanding the data set and maybe adding other features tbc.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.