Do you want another priceoptimiser/helper program?

[SearchFunction]

Hello all

I have, like mdoupe, developed a program to help me find better cheaper ways to buy bricks from BL. The program works as intended and have helped me to a certain degree when buying bricks. It is however tailored to my needs, and since I am faily new at programming, it contains some shortcuts, simply because I do not know how else to do it.

I don´t really have time to provide proper support for it, and have been wondering if I should release it or not. Since BL2.0 is on the way, and everything I have made once it launches will be outdated and unuseable, I want to know if you people here, would like to have it anyway to play around with?

It will be unsupported, but I will try to listen to your needs.

So far it have the following features compared to Brickficiency:

- Uses an algoritm to cut down solution search to a few minutes. This can be modified, better results takes longer time.

- Once a solution is found, tells you exactly what to buy in each store for the best price, minimum buys taken into consideration

- Blacklist for stores you dont like

- Blacklist for words in lot descriptions you dont like

- Average shipping costs can be provided for a more realistic solution

Limits

- bricks must exists, and a color must be provided

- Only bricks and minifigs is recognized

- Not optimised for multicore CPUs

- Region options are "everywhere" or "EU only", I might be able to expand on this

- Collects only data from shops that provide a paypal option

I worked on this program before mdoupe announced Brickficiency so it has been interesting to see the feedback he have gotten. Our techniques are similar in aproach, but different in technology used.

EDIT:

So I got a little bit of time to write some basic instructions.

The program can be downloaded from here

http://www.filedropper.com/brickfinder01

HOW TO USE (Short version):

Step 1.

Go to a BL "My wantedlist" page, select "Hide items for sale", press go, and then "Show all". For each page you have, you have to right click anywhere on the page, select "view sourcecode" and copypaste everything into the top textbox in BrickFinder, then click "Extract lots". Then save.

Step 2.

Type in your your 2 letter ship country ID, and select if you want to limit your data collection to the EU only. Then click on "Query shops for inventory". This can take a while. Then save.

Step 3.

In the 4 fields below the "Show wantedlist" button fill in information after the following guidelines:

Currency modifier: Prices are collected in whatever currency BL decides is right for your country. If you want the result to be shown in another currency, this is where you type in the exchange ratio.

Average shipping costs: Make a guess for much you think shipping will cost you on average, or set to 0 if you dont care. This is used in calculations to decide if adding another shop with cheaper parts are worth the trouble. Note that if you change the currency modifier, you must also change the shipping costs to the amount it would be in the new currency.

Max shops: The maximum number of shops you want to find solutions fore. You can use this to make the search faster, if you are satisfied with a certain number and only want to see if better solutions are possible.

Max paths(Short explanation): The higher this number is, the BETTER a solution you get. Also the higher it is, the LONGER it takes. 3-5 should give you pretty decent results.

Step 4.

Click on "Find price". This shouldnt take too long. 5-15 minutes. Then, if a solution is found the result will be displayed to you. I´m not going to go into details about it, should be fairly easy to understand what the numbers mean.

You can then adjust the max shops/max paths and try again if you want a better result. Or by pressing "Copy To Output" the text gets moved to the top textbox, where you can copy it to your prefered word processing program. You can also write unwanted words from lots or shopnames into the two text files for this purpose (remember to save). The program does not need to be restarted to do this.

If you find that you need to adjust an inventory item or wantedlist, you can save the data, and open the Data.txt file and fiddle with the numbers in there. It could be made simpler, but this was the fast and easy solution.

Notes of caution:

1. The cancel button should only be used in step 4. If you get funny results, better to restart the program.

2. Many shops have special terms you need to check up on first before ordering anything!

3. Buying straight from Lego is often a better deal, than ordering from 8-10 sellers due to shipping.

Allright, hope I havn't scared anyone off. Program most likely only works on Windows platforms. As I wrote previously, support will be somewhat limited as I am pressed for time these days. I just hope someone other than me could benefit from it. Use it in combination with Brickficiency

Edited March 3, 2014 by SearchFunction

[legolijntje]

I would like to try out the software, but the download link doesn't seem to work?