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User Interface
Inspiration
Recently a member of our group built his very own gaming PC. While searching for parts, it became a hassle searching up the same parts on various websites to compare stock and prices at various retailers. We then realized this is a very common issue when trying to buy anything online. Being university students, most of us resort to purchasing portable technologies like laptops to use in our post-secondary education. For the reason of assisting a large population of post-secondary students, we decided to create a single database where we can access relevant information for laptops on websites such as Staples.ca as well as Bestbuy.ca which are two very large and common technology retailers. With this project, users will obtain information on models, price, reviews and ratings on the featured laptops from these retailers from which they can browse quickly dependent on what they're looking for
What it does
Through our site, you can get a list of the laptops available at two different stores (Best Buy and Staples). Through just the click of a button, you will get a list database of the different laptops, displaying its name, price, rating and store in a table format. This makes it convenient to find and decide which laptop you want without having to go on multiple different store's webpages.
How I built it
To build this project, we used python, selenium and html to power the software behind our web scraper. We used python as our programming language in order to import selenium. We then scraped the staples and Best Buy webpages to gather information needed for each of their laptop products. We then bundled the information for each laptop together and organized them into a csv format where they can be easily viewed in one database using information from more than one source
Challenges I ran into
As mentioned above, our team had no prior knowledge in web scraping or front end web development. This was all new to us so inevitably we faced many challenges. When beginning the project, the first challenge we faced was setting up our programming environment. As we were using these programming languages and tools for the first time, we needed to make sure all the drivers and files were installed correctly to proceed with our project. Once this was done, we found it challenging to actually get going. We were unsure about how we wanted to accomplish our goal so we chose to talk to a few mentors which we found incredibly helpful. Along with their help, the resources we found online came in handy.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
As individuals, each member did not have any experience with web scraping prior to this hackathon. That being said we are really proud at what our team was able to achieve in the 24 hours we had. We all learned how to use selenium through python and be able to parse through the HTML code of websites to create a database.
What I learned
Through this project, we learned various things about automation and python programming. we learned that through selenium we can make many tasks easier by scraping different websites and collecting relevant data that is important and useful to us. Through collecting this data, the task of making decisions become much easier. We also learned about how to format webpages in HTML.
What's next for Laptop Inventory -
Our next steps for this project would be to expand our database with data from several other tech sites. We currently have data on laptops from Best Buy and Staples but there are many other available stores that sell laptops which users may consider. With a more diversified database we would be able to help and support a lot more users. In addition to this change, we will also look into creating other similar databases with other tech items to accompany what we have right now.
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