Brickrake: Command Line Tools for Saving Money on Bricklink

[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!

[Calabar]

duckworthd, welcome to EuroBricks.

Your software seemst to be very interesiting. Thanks for sharing it!

As you can notice, in the Section Index we already have a list of Lego Software and Utilities.

If you want to spend a bit of your time, you can create an "Official Topic" for your application, that have to include a brief description, images, link a step by step guide, if necessary.

Then I will add your utility to the Section Index.

[DLuders]

@ duckworthd: Welcome to Eurobricks! Had you seen the capabilities of Rebrickable yet? It has the ability of importing Brickstore BSX files and then scanning available Bricklink stores for parts for MOCs like that huge Lego Rex v2:

Image

Edited February 24, 2013 by Calabar
: Oversized image converted in text link

[legolijntje]

Nice, I already had a very good program for this. I saw it on the Brickset forums, but it needed MatLab to run the software. I wanted to make a Visual Basic program of it with a GUI, but my knowledge was (and is) too basic to make something like this.

I'll defenitly look into your program.

[dvsntt]

I wish I was capable of using this software. It takes forever to source and purchase the parts, and managing the wanted list can be a nightmare itself.

Please make one for people like me. I'd be happy to donate for it.

[alienwar9]

You might have made my day! If I can figure out how to easily use this, you will have saved me weeks of painful work. I am sort of coming back from the dead after a horrendous experience with bricklink. I had about 9,000 pieces to purchase, with more than 1,000 different types, and I was in a hurry to meet a deadline. It took me 4 days of 16-20 hrs straight with 3 monitors of multiple store pages trying to manually filter for the cheapest prices.... and you can guess how many mistakes that led to. (Granted, I also happened to pick the exact day where bricklink crashed to start all this, so that didn't help).

Anyway, I ended up $2,000 over budget, and I had to go back a few months later to recoup and purchase about $300 worth of missing pieces (either from my mistakes, or stores that forgot pieces because I asked for rush service....when bricklink crashed). I'm betting I'm not the only one with horror stories that could have been prevented. That is why I think this is one of the greatest developments for some MOC builders, saving people a lot of time, mistakes, and money. I'd be more than happy to donate or help out in any way (though my coding/programming skills are pretty much non-existant).

I still have 5 more stages of my project to get through, so I'm fully on board the idea of this program!