Keep track of the prices for a large series of products and enable yourself to take advantage of this data!

This branch: Central

Features added to this branch:

• Targeted for collecting Graphics Cards prices
• Centralizes the prices for all different products in a single SQLite database
• Now it's much easier to schedule for the price collection of multiple products
• Filtering is simpler

How can this help me?

This can be used to satisfy business and personal necessities, for monitoring your competitor's prices, help on calculating price indexes for specific types of products or monitoring the price of a product you want to buy.

Requirements

This project depends in Python version 3.12 or superior to be installed in your computer (Recommended to tick the option "Add python to PATH" if you are on Windows).

Installation

You can install the latest development version by using Git:

git clone https://github.com/VFLins/price_indexr.git
git checkout central
pip install ./price_indexr

How to use?

This version is intended to be used from interface.py, this is a TUI (Text User Interface), where you can add new products to keep track of.

To accommodate the initial need to obtain prices for GPUs from many different models and manufacturers, the products are organized into a two-level hierarchy.

1. In the higher level are the "product names", originally used to store the chip names
2. In the lower level are the "brand", "model" and "filters"
   • Filters are used to mark words that should not appear on the targeted product title
     • Hardcoded filters are added to reduce typing time
     • Should be separated by commas (,)
     • For single filters with multiple words, the words should be separated by underscore (_)
   • Every word in Brand, Model and Product Name are required to appear in the result title in order for the price to be collected

To add a product for monitoring:

Simply double-click interface.py, open with a python interpreter, and follow the instructions on the screen. Make sure you have all the requirements installed before opening interface.py.

To automate the weekly price data collection:

Set scheduler.pyw to be executed when your system starts, and set a python interpreter to be the default program to run this file extension. For instructions on how to do this on Windows, follow this guide and this other guide respectively.

To access your collected data:

Inside the same folder that price_indexr.py is located, look for a folder named data, there you might find a database.db file. This is a sqlite database, you can use SQLite Studio to browse your dataset.

[New!] Collect prices on demand:

Just use interface.py and follow the instructions on the screen, you can collect prices for a specific product or for groups of products.

See also:

• Prind_Monitor: Report generator for price data obtained by this piece of software, only compatible with SQLite databases for now.