PPEScraper

• 

  N95 Box and Whisker

Inspiration

I helped my friend build a web scraper to track the prices of animal crossing amiibo cards, and after seeing the Health theme, I thought this sort of economic data could help people not only make money off amiibo cards, but save money by getting a fair deal on their necessary protective equipment.

What it does

It scrapes data off ebay about previously completed listings, a.k.a what people have already payed for those items, a.k.a, what the market has decided as the value of those items. It displays this both in the form of a box and whisker plot and a 5 day moving average (by default, this can be changed.) This can hopefully help you make smart purchases.

How I built it

Using python and the selenium module to load and scrape the information, and using pandas and matplotlib to process and display the information.

Challenges I ran into

There are so many different prefixes and suffixes to describe the quantities of mask being sold. I ended up dedicating a whole module to parsing that data.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Applying my (now increased) web scraping knowledge to something that feels applicable and significant in the real world.

What I learned

How to properly work with pandas filters, and the differences between the matplotlib libraries and pyplot libraries, and how although they behave similarly, they often do not get along. Also, I learned that some people intentionally leave the quantity of masks out of the title of their listings, leading me down a wild goose chase of eliminating outliers.

What's next for PPEScraper

After I perform similar refinement to my animal crossing scraper, I'll definitely come back and give this app some TLC, a front end, a gallery for saved charts, something like that.

Built With

• batchfile
• html
• powershell
• python