duckworthd

Hi everyone, A few weeks ago, I came across a METAL GEAR REX build on Reddit that inspired me to jump into the LEGO community. I was amazed to discover how dedicated the community is to making the most of those little plastic bricks of my youth. I wanted immediately to buy up the pieces I needed, but soon discovered that for a project the size of METAL GEAR REX, selecting individual parts from thousands of sellers could take days! Brickstore said I would need to spend roughly $1,000 USD if I followed the average price -- surely there must be a better way? And so I thought, "Why not build a better way?" Brickrake is the fruition of that thought. Given a BrickStore XML or BrickLink XML parts list, Brickrake will scrape store information and parts prices, find the cheapest stores to buy from, and give you a one-wanted-list-per-store BrickLink XML file you can upload. Then, using Brickrake's javascript bookmarket, you can select exactly the amount you want from your wanted list -- no more, no less. While Brickrake works for me, it's far from user friendly at this point. It's no more than a suite of command line tools, is doubtless full of loose ends, and requires Gurobi, which is only accessible to students and faculty at academic institutions. For those familiar with programming, I hope this tool will be of great use for you. For those not, I hope to create a nice GUI in the near future. Cheers!