Matt's Retirement Plan

Inspiration

When we were brainstorming ideas. One of our members had a problem staying up till 5 in the morning, unfortunately not because of coding, but instead because he was waiting for an eBay auction which would inevitably get sniped. Through research, we realized that there are pay-to-win snipe bots but little open-source bots, furthermore we found that eBay's stance on bot was just to bid higher than them. As such we wished to even the playing field for eBay customer by developing an opensource bot that would be available for the public.

What it does

This bot creates and executes eBay snipes (i.e. auction bids that initiate as close to the deadline as possible).

How we built it

We built this bot in Java, with use of the Selenium Framework to load the auction url, a java task schedular to call the snipe at time.

Challenges we ran into

An early challenge we ran into was how to automatically have the user be signed in. Additionally, there was some hangup on extracting particular web-elements (i.e. countdown timer, bid buttons, etc.)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were proud when we figured out a way to have the user logged by extracting cookie data, and re-injecting said cookie data. Additionally, we were able to add more polish such as having a JavaFX GUI. Which we weren't expecting to get to within our time-limit.

What we learned

Throughout this project we honed our allocation skills, learned a new framework (selenium), and learned about intricacies about grabbing web-elements.