Laptop Comparator

Current Progress State

 Still In Production... Final Project will be released later this year.........

Inspiration

While looking for a laptop last year, what I noticed was unlike TV's, iPhones, Androids, or other mobile or standing electronic devices, laptops and computers were extremely difficult to sort through and very annoying to look for a deal with. The reason for this was that with all the various components, Ghz of processors, generations of components, graphics cards, processors, screens, displays, cooling systems, cooling efficiency, and a TON of more computer facts, looking for the perfect laptop with an affordable price tag was way to difficult.

What it does

That is why we created Laptop Comparator. Essentially, this is a website run using Python and Django that is able to take information in about all the different models of laptops out there and sort them, finding the best deals for all the different types of consumers. On the website, there are detailed explanations of the different processors, graphics cards, displays, and other computer parts. Each of these components have a rating (1 - 10 stars), and the explanations on how powerful each component is described. Next, the bulk of the project is one in which using beautiful-soup 4, the website webscrapes laptops from all the major retailers, Amazon, and the manufacturers themselves. The user is able to select different components they want, and laptops and computers with those different components are displayed, along with price. Although we are still working on producing the website, we have achieved functionality and using different URL patterns, we use these retailer's websites to find the best deals for the best laptops.

How we built it

In order to create this project, we used Python, Java, Django, and beautiful-soup.

Challenges we ran into

Truly, one of the largest challenges we ran into during this project was getting beautiful-soup to work. It was one of the most difficult parts of the project as it was new to the majority of the team, but after a while, we discovered how to get laptop information from a retailer.

What we learned

We learned some more object - oriented Python, Django, beautiful-soup, and some Java as well. We also learned how to link a back - end on to a front - end.

What's next for Laptop Comparator

In order to help consumers see if they're getting a good deal or not, we might add up the prices of the components of each laptop independently, and add an estimated manufacturing cost, and see how much above the laptop's price is then the individual components' price. Above 25% would be too expensive.

Built With

• beautiful-soup
• django
• java
• python
• tkinter
• webscraping