Coming up later in 2016

To the many many people who stop by everyday, welcome and thank you!

To those of you who might hang around and revisit these pages I'd like to just go over a few items I'm looking at performing over the next few weeks.

Firstly, I have a big technical post about setting up Trac with Subversion, including securing it, hosting it on a virtual server and really getting you up and running with project tracking and management with Trac, from total scratch.

Secondly, I have a big of Dungeons and Dragons stuff to cover, both a bit about the official rules and the in-house rules we play with, and there will hopefully be a live stream with my niece whom is D&D crazy, and even made me a D&D based birthday card, which we will play through together.

Third, electronics, I'm probably not going to get to do the PS/2 connector project previously listed, but as the autumn winds in and and the winter comes across, I hope to get back to the DCC layout stuff, not least because I have a tonne of stuff laying around for it and two part soldered projects ready to go.

Fourth, a bit of computer history, I have a manual (just a manual) for a VAX VMS, I'd like to do some coverage of that for you all to geek out over.

Fifth and perhaps finally, gaming, I'm going to be looking back at Elite Dangerous I think, with the release and massive price tag on "No Mans Sky", I'm going to go back and see if Elite has done anything more interesting.  I've also been looking at buying Squad, the successor to "project reality" and going into that.  Our good friend Chaplain has invited us to play some Arma 3 time with him, and I'm playing World of Warships still.  So we'll go through all of that.

Sixth, so yes, fifth was not final, programming.  I'm looking at a project internal to myself, something I want to actually create, manage & sell.  So we'll see how that goes, but understandably there's not a lot I can share.  You will also find me touting myself for business at www.freelancer.co.uk, and as such I hope to make up some of the wads of cash we've been spending since the wife's surgery.

I'll speak to you all soon, I may start to make a mid-month post like this for you all to catch up on, but we'll see how things pan out.

In the mean time, the pony has a new home, and she has a new friend meet our Gerty and Magic once again:

My X55 Settings in Elite & War Thunder

Last night, I spent a fair amount of time setting up my new X55 Rhino some more, firstly I spent time sorting out the wires, as I need to be able to insert and remove the sticks depending on how I want to play different games.

But once that was done, it was into various games to set up the controls... Elite Dangerous was one, as we saw in the sneak peak I had no joystick inserted playing the other night.  This was interrupted somewhat by having to download and install the new beta.

However, I also went to set up my full controls in WarThunder for flight... And I needed to do something different than before, as I'd found the stick really twitchy in the elevator and somewhat sluggish in the roll.... This is just for loading the X55 profile in the game itself.

Luckily, I did spot this video....

And it gave me a couple of tips, the first was to change the sensativity of the rudder (yaw) and the elevator (pitch).

I also changed how I was doing the trimming.

But the biggest change, and it really made a difference - at least in test flight - was to raise the seat.  I had never spotted those controls before, but I've attached them to the X55's throttle onto one of the lovely silver switches.  I raise it just as we see in the video, so the cross hair is just a touch inside the glass.

Even resetting the Track IR, I do raise the head position up.

With these new settings, and the lightest spring in the X55, test flights were excellent, the standard BF109 loop I do, under the bridges, through the rails of other things and then through the chimneys in the town was brilliantly light to the touch.

My next challenge is going to be to improve some of my pilot's spotting skills, and taking flight to fight.

Elite Dangerous - Trade Tool Sneak Peak - Update - Progress Pt12

I have been starting to set up to record my programming and testing... Here is a test stream - I didn't have my joystick plugged in, hence the erratic flight, but you can see me pop up the trade data and it quickly find me a worth while trade in system.

http://www.twitch.tv/xelous/b/631915041

And one of my coding environment....

http://www.twitch.tv/xelous/b/631920214

Update: You can now support this project at Patreon!

USB 3.0 Storage Project

This weekend has seen the final parts of the server infrastructure I had powered down, and this leaves me with a gap in my storage needs.

I carry two mechanical harddrives, old laptop 2.5" drives, power by 5v with me most of the time, but these are getting old (and they were already old before I pulled them out of the retiring laptops they served) they're also quite slow and I have no back-up for them.

This is a situation which can not continue on my conscience.  Therefore, I've just bought a pair of 32GB USB 3.0 flashdrives, a cheap USB 3.0 hub and a hot glue gun.

The project is going to be to strip an old 3.5" hard drive, even dremel the middle out of it iff needs be, and after stripping the hub and sticks of their plastic shells, mounting them inside the old hard drive shell.  Screw the shell back up and hopefully I have a 64GB storage space, which is none-mechanical, and which I can just plug-in and go.

Initially this is going to be for moving some recorded files around and perhaps holding a git repository, or even my old SVN respoitories for checking or supporting projects.

If it's a successhowever, I maybe looking at a nicer strip USB hub, and slowly building 64GB sticks at a time (£10 a pop) to build up a big drive, with a full back up script etc.

I may also be getting together a USB 2.0 hub and a couple of 8GB flash drives to act as a storage backup on the web-server, this will be for the Elite Trade data to be dropped off on.

Or this lad has the idea...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMV9zFz4ZVw

Elite Dangerous - Trading Tools - Office & Server Update - Progress Pt11

Update: You can now support this project at Patreon!

Where have I been?  And what have I been doing?

Well, I've not been coding, not one line of new code has passed my finger tips.

What has been happening though is a complete remodelling of my office and work area, I've been to ikea and on my zero dollar budget (yes, no-one has yet dipped into their pocket to sponsor this project) I got a very cheap new table, a monitor rising shelf and made my power arrangements safe.

This new work area has then seen over 18 hours of solid testing, from system to system, station to station, collecting data.  As well as using the analysis tool to make advantage of it.

My next quest/test will be to allow manual editing, or at least suggested editing, of the database to remove, or correct those sometimes mis-detected names of commodities.

The test after that will be to go and find some rares, see how they process out, and begin a list of them spotted, so as they can be highlighted in the analysis tool.

The data collection server is also a priority now, the old Power Edge 2650 machines have been decommissioned, and I've actually donated them to a charity so they can perhaps sell them and make some money.  The new server is a Pentium 4 based box, which will be running Ubuntu Server, or maybe Arch... Though in the long run a Raspberry PI 2 running Arch may take over, if suitable network storage can be arranged, or if I can power a 2.5" 5V HDD from the Pi itself via USB for storage.

Cheap cheap, this is the way.

I've had more correspondance from potential users and people just asking for the program, it's not ready folks, help me to help you by supporting the project with a donation, or through patreon.

As for those still asking "why", simply because I don't want to run on my computer things others have written, I find some tools collecting market data must be simply opening the Elite Dangerous process, getting the tokens set to read the memory and slurping out all the data they want.  Frontier asked other projects to stop doing that, so we won't even state.

And then why am I doing this alone?  Because I like to code, it's my profession, not just a hobby, this isn't just a script thrown together in Python, or a slap dapse executable thrown out there with who only knows what malware attached, no this is a formal project, with revisions, a coding standard and it's letting me get to grips with OCR, something I've always thought about needing, but never got to use.

More updates at the weekend folks.

Update: You can now support this project at Patreon!

Elite Dangerous - Trading Tools - User Privacy - Progress Pt10

Update: You can now support this project at Patreon!

The boring bits of the Elite Dangerous Trade data tool... Yes, this weekend I've been checking as to what information I can extract without wanting to draw the ire of Frontier... Using OCR you can pretty much read anything, at least here in the UK, so long as I don't represent this as my data and I don't charge anything to access the information.  Which I never will.  Then we're free to collect information.

I believe tools like this go one step further, because you can argue we'll be showing off the internal complexity of the markets in the game and so perhaps selling the trade side of the game.

Anyway, as part of the boring bits, I also have to check with you, the users, what you want to let the program do.

Now clearly, by downloading the program you accept it's going to run on your computer... You do get that yes?... I had one guy, well lets say, he's a bit slow, he didn't realise I was writing a program, he asked to be a tester and when I handed him the exe I got this very puzzling reply... "Where's the script"... it's a program mate.. a program... an executable.

Anyway, the one thing you guys get to control is what, if anything, the program is going to do with your data, both the information - like your name you type in - and the actual trade data you collect.

So, I've got some questions being asked, and a new configuration file which lets you take control of whether you share your data etc....

This is the penultimate build which is behind closed doors, I'm soon going to be able to collect this data to my server, so we'll start to see the application out there for download and more of you to try it.

However, I do still need more testers... Comment below to volunteer!

Update: You can now support this project at Patreon!

Elite Dangerous - Trading Tools - General Update - Progress Pt9

Update: You can now support this project at Patreon!

Right, it's been a week, but I've not rested on my laurels with the Elite Dangerous Trade Data Collection, prior to my spending sometime playing the new Beta 1.0 and Beta 1.1 I had taken my first pilgrimage to Earth:

But it gave me a chance to test some of the commodity capturing, especially in the stations with lighter hangar backgrounds.

Capturing went all well...

As you can see, we have Sol XML data.  I visited the three earth stations, the moon station, Mercury and the platform at Venus.  It was interesting to immediately see taking Gold from Mercury or Venus to Earth was as profitable as my run taking Gold between LHS1914 and FK5 2550 - the main run I had been doing previously.

other asthetic changes I've made is just making the console application look better, it is a console application to collect the image data, because it doesn't need to take a lot of processing power to tell you what it's up to.

Under the hood I'm also adding user friendliness, as I had the process Id being manually entered, but this meant people had to open task manager, add the process id column and a bunch of other stuff, which people just didn't want to do.  Least not my two lazy ass testers - I NEED BETTER TESTERS!

So, now the application will enumerate through the windows, find one named the same as the Elite Dangerous client and try to use that process id, before it'll give up and just ask you to enter the correct Process Id.

General Update

I've been a busy boy this weekend, I've ordered some new network wire to bring Cat 6 Ethernet directly to the upstairs bedrooms, so I have that to fit out, I've organised all my finances after the house move and everything.

I've retired my two Dell Power Edge servers - just because they were so loud - and I've got a whole bunch of pictures of them for their going on e-bay later this week - they'll be sold as a batch lot, as I basically use one as parts for the other, but they're not shabby, the heavily used on is is ironically one of the cleanest machines I have.

Their replacement is a much more suitable Pentium 4 PC - my old World of Warcraft & Eve-Online machine in fact, it's a massive downgrade in power - we're going from dual 64bit Xeon's on a server chassis to a 32bit 2001 Pentium 4.  But it's all about getting away with leaving the PC running in the front room, where it'll be part of my internet provision of services.

I've also been servicing and modding my Saitek X45 joystick, I've got a friend of a friend sorting out a set of new springs for me, I've looked carefully at modding the handle, and also had the thing in pieces to discover what's inside.  I maybe putting together a whole post on this alone, as there are not many or much good information about this solid old stick on the interwebs.  Mine being 12 years old it's lasted a long time with no intervention.  It's played me through MS Combat Flight Simulator, the original IL2, IL2 Forgotten Battles and IL2 1946.

It started to get a little funky in War Thunder last month, I noted I could not keep my 109's from pulling oddly, I thought it was a trimming issue, but it was actually the lack in my spring.

Anyway, as I say, more about all that later.

In Elite-Dangerous, I've been out and about in the universe, I've taken my pilgrimage to Sol, I arrived there last night, and docked at Abraham Lincolm station just as Australia was coming into view below.  I'm going to take a better look tonight.  However, on the way, though I have a fuel scoop I did decide to stop off and dock at a station, just to update my save at that point.  The Commodity reading software worked a treat, even on the system name it had never been trained on before.  Going forward I need to improve the capturing sequence, as it's a little clunky even for me; and I created it; but data capture is working out really well now.  Capturing and the reading of the commodities, with my myriad of little updates and string swaps is working extremely well.

Aside from changing the capturing to be more, shall we say, slick; I'm also going to be adding threaded operation to the OCR, so as I can leverage some of the multi-core features on machines to speed up the reading process.  There is a notable delay at the moment between the images being captured and the OCR kicking in.  Yes, part of this is writing the images as bitmaps to disk, but the major delay is the serial nature of it going down the list, I may as well go down two different parts of the lists at the same time!

Apart form selling the Dell servers, I'm also going to be selling a really nice 1024x768 resolution CRT monitor, my last CRT monitor.  I'm only selling it because it's being retired along with the servers, it was their heads up display.  But it's one of those crystal clear displays perfect for coding with.

I'm also going to be selling the Samsung CLP-320 laser printer, because... well, despite being only 4 years old it's not survived, it still works, but there are fading in and out on the printing, I've replaced the toners (at a hell of a cost) and so I can only conclude it needs some tinkering with or servicing, which I don't want to do.  So I'll go out the door for spares & repairs on ebay.

If I get a decent price for all these bits of stuff I'm selling, I may be looking to get myself the £160 X55 Rhino flight stick, but this is perhaps a pipe-dream with the financial situation as it is.

Elite Dangerous - Trading Tools - Client/Server - Progress Pt8

Support this project now at Patreon, or donate directly via PayPal:

The development plan, now that we have reliable data collection, is to start to share the tool; but more importantly to share the data.  I will be publishing clearer details of the XML format being used, however, it is a node only based text format, at present a commodity looks like this:

I plan to wrap this basic format into an outer "Commodities" node, with the date & time included, and make that publically available.

However, I do not plan to generate that whole list - especially as the data set grows - I plan to generate that list maybe weekly at most, as I am going to be driving this for free*.

To recap the current process for capturing the information, you play the game, and run the image processing application, then from within the game client - without tabbing to the image processor, you just press keys - you can send commands to the image processor to capture images of the navigation and commodities screen, to start them capturing the character information with tesseract:

Armed with your local data, you then run the separate windows application - and yes you do have to be able to tab to this application - to perform searches of your collected data store, which looks like this:

If you opt into sharing your data you are helping the project, at the most basic level, providing your data you will help yourself and other players!  So by sharing your local data store it gets uploaded - periodically - to the server.

Once you run the trade analyser, when you've been sharing your data, it will download the latest public list and start to use this, if you are a special supporter, sponsor or donor this is where your live cycling of the data will take place, the trade tool will automatically authenticate with the server, and start to receive the updates from all other players faster than the general list.

Of course, you will be able to write your own tool to access this same data, and be able to call the server to download the current public list of commodities and use that in your tools, other sites and projects are welcome to use this data as we collect it.  However, I do ask that you share, and help this project collect data in return.

I will be generating the special patron, sponsored, active list at least daily, if not hourly, so anyone supporting the project through Patreon, or through a sufficiently high single donation will be given access levels giving them near live, or as I say at least daily updates of the information from the project.

This won't does not affect your local data store, if you collect data live, then it is your data, and you opt into sharing that information.

As the  project matures I also hope to be capturing system connectivity data, this is where other information - such as your ship's current jump range - may be required, so help the server rationalise the data.

The server will also afford a level of checking and sanitisation to the data, so signing up to help the project you will receive a more accurate data set, not only for the commodities names, but the prices as well as the supply & demand.

What do I mean by sanitised data?  Well, the OCR is not perfect, as a side effect of either over-training, or under-training, it makes mistakes.  It also makes mistakes when the background behind your commodity screen changes - this can be because you were using the capturer whilst in the hangar, or whilst just on the surface of the landing pad.  These variations affect the isolation and interpretation being carried out.

Here is a good example:

Clearly the reader got it wrong on at least one pass, and created a new erroneous commodity, or sometimes it just plain gets it wrong:

You can spot these kinds of mistakes in the other screen shots I've already published:

The server however will be able to sanitise this data, that is correct spelling mistakes, or ask the master list (or myself) to confirm what is meant by a new name or a miss-spelled name.  Helping correct this data.

Your local data store will not do this and such mistakes will just sit there, until removed or updated by your sharing your data and receiving the new ratified list of commodities.

As well as mistakes with the name, sometimes it also makes mistakes with the values being read, this can lead to interesting problems.  I did once set off on a 4 system flight loaded with (you know I forget what) but it had a profit of 800,000 credits!!!!  WHAO!

Only when I arrived did I find out I'd made a loss, because I'd bought these things at something like 2,000 units, and the OCR had mixed up the 1877 of the destination with 7811, vasting increasing the profit margin the tools thought I would get.

This problem has been reduced, but again depending on the background at the moment the commodities or captured, of if they are a "good" screenshot or not it can happen that mistakes are made.

By sharing the data however, there will be multiple, perhaps even tens or hundreds of imprints of the same commodity at the same station coming in, the server will be able to average or at least rationalise these values and filter out wildly high values!

This is data sanitation, filtering out the outrageous mistakes we as humans would spot instantly, ornot even make as we can read the screen perfectly well.

Of course, running such servers is going to be costly, and so to share we do ask you help support the project.... Over at patreon you will find our page.

Elite Dangerous - Trading Tools - OCR - Progress Pt7

Help Sponsor me and this project now! Click here for details:

Over the weekend I've been working on the collection of data, so I've been to a few more systems and stations, I've been checking the algorithm for finding the best route, and I've been giving myself some feedback...

The first two things I immediately wanted was the program to remember the last folder used, and also as I captured data, to be able to refresh the loaded information without having to close & open the tool again.  Basic stuff.

So, loading the data looks like this now:

Lets say we've got courier missions from LHS 1914 to FK5 2550, we select the start system, so LHS 1914:

This instantly populates the Stations and total list of commodities in columns 2 and 3 there.  We can select the specific station we're docked in as well:

Reducing the number of commodities, now we could just select Fk5 2550 from the destination system list, just to see what would bring us the most profit in running into that system:

The answer here is then given in the top right box, that result will stay there now until we change system or destination system, we can get the same search just without the station select from the second column also, but then the search would start from all stations in the source system on the left.

This search alone wasn't enough however, because I needed to be able to quickly find a supply of certain commodities, hence the new controls in the right bottom.

Lets say we want to find Beryllium for a specific mission goal, we can select that commodity by name from the drop down:

The results are the source of Beryllium from the database in best price (for purchase) order.  Obviously, if you've selected a commodity you've never seen before then you get no reply, unfortunately in the current context there is no distance, or connectivity in the database, so we don't know if these items are close or not, that is still a player decision*.

The other feature added there is the "Demand For" search, this simply lists those commodities in the database which are wanted somewhere, the results are given in best price (for sale) order, this allows you to quickly marry up any profit (if any) there maybe to be had, I find it most useful if the upper algorithm driven box comes up with an illegal selection.

* However, I do envisage changing the data collection so as data is captured from system to system we have a basic web of where it connected to where by input, this basic webbing could then be used to add "how many jumps" a commodity is from the selected source or destination systems.  However, to add all this functionality I need your help!

Elite Dangerous - Market & Trading Tools

SHOW YOUR SUPPORT!

Today I have taken time to put together a Patreon page, this is intended to help establish my project with some real backing, the pledges are Monthly for just $1 a month you can help speed up the development of this suite of tools:

https://www.patreon.com/Xelous

You can opt to support me with higher pledges per month as well, but all the time you can choose your level of support for the project.

If you can't afford to help, then please just show the love in the comments below.

General Update -Elite Dangerous - Houses - Money

So it's been a long couple of months, our Christmas was severely cut back, and we've been waiting for the house sale to go through... It should complete Friday... So today I'm busy taking my excess hours off of work and going down to give the place a once over and then to the estate agents to hand in the keys ready for hand-over.

It has been a rather stressful time, not least with the ex-tenants we had being chased from pillar to post for debts they've racked up.. The best one being the illegal sub-tenant being prosecuted by Derbyshire City Council over a parking ticket... She appeared in court - how they summonsed her I don't know... But she still put our property address down as her own, in court, in early January 2015, despite not living in our property since October 2014...

I'd call that perjury, but I'd also call it incompetence by the court because the wife and I are on the council tax & electoral register, it'd have taken minutes to discover this and shows they didn't confirm the guilty party's address!

Needless to say, when the notice of impending removal of goods arrived, the wife ripped it open and nearly fainted, I've sent them a letter now, but we're still expecting burly blokes with bad attitudes to arrive, so the wife has her ID out and ready to show them through the window.

With all this going on Money has been an issue, hopefully tomorrow it gets a lot freer as the house funds get cleared to us, my plan is to wire cat6 shielded network wire into the upstairs and remove buy new springs for my X45 control stick.  All to aid my enjoyment of Elite, as well as WarThunder and some other games.

I've not been able to play any simulator battles in WarThunder for a while, because the spring on my stick is now as slack as a wizard sleeve, so straight and level flight is almost impossible, accurate gunnery is impossible.

I'm looking at ordering a set of springs from a place in Redditch and have a friend; a Redditch native; bring them up.

Coding wise, as you can see I've got the OCR tools working, last night was the first time I didn't do any collecting of data, I sat down with the 5 systems I had done, and I just used the tool (as shown in yesterdays post - pt6)... It was amazingly good, I tweaked one trade I had been taking Gold about for $45,000 profit (in my cobra with 36 cargo), but found I had a palladium source and consumer upping that first leg to $49,500.

The return leg I had been carrying Liquor for around £11,000 profit, I upped that to $18,500 by swapping to Power Generators.

Rinse and repeat, the viewer tool as you see in the previous screen shot worked great, a lot better than the first revision I'd put together.

Running the game in a window (though full screen border less) also gave better interactive results, I could have the collector running, and then slide the mouse out the client to use the data.  I need to add a refresh - or even an auto-refresh which detects file changes as data is collected - but for now this suits my purposes.  And it achieved results I earned a little over $800,000 credits trading in the short two hours I had to play last night... Taking me from Peddler to Dealer ranking to boot.

I am looking for testers, or backers, if you want to help, or offer advice, or offer support (in the form of servers for data collection or just money to pay for the hosting I think we'll need, just drop me a line in the comments below).

Elite Dangerous - Trading Tools - OCR - Progress Pt6

Update: You can now support this project at Patreon!

Armed with some of my data I've had two stabs at making use of the data, and so here's the first peek at the tool I've thrown together to let me make use of the information, one simply selects the start system and then the destination system and the best commodity (for profit) is calculated.

You can also refine the start point by station or specifically a commodity, before you select the destination to give a specific start point and be given the best profit item.

The next feature I'm going to add is a box to enter the name of a commodity and find where it's sold as a list of system & station names, just as a helper for what's already in the game's galaxy map.

Elite Dangerous - Trading Tools - OCR - Progress Pt5

Update: You can now support this project at Patreon!

So, last night I had my first long run and tuning up session, capturing system name, station name and commodities as I played the game... As you can see, I have quite a few captured commodities now:

I'm now going to throw together a separate reader, to load the data set and let me do comparisons or round-trip plotting of best prices.

But, I thought i'd explain how this application works, as I've posted it into the streams of a few Twitch chaps playing Elite, and everyone seems to have their own preconceptions....

1) This is a stand alone application, it runs in windows completely separately to Elite.

2) It captures the screen images, it DOES NOT open the processes memory.

3) The areas of the screens captured are filtered, and then passed to an optical character recognition (OCR) system.

4) The OCR system I'm using is Tesseract

5) The image processing is triggered by keys:  In game you just play, and then Press F1 whilst in the navigation menu, and the program will take a shot and try to work out the system.

6) Press F2 whilst in the commodities screen, and the station name is captured.

7) Press F3 and this toggles on the capturing of the area the commodities are listed in, it takes pictures until you press F3 again, so you slowly scroll down the list, then press F3 and the program passes the images taken for processing.

8) The data is written out as XML and contains the System/Station name, then the Commodity Name, the buy and sell prices, and then the supply & demand levels.

I have had to do some manual fixing of things, such as correcting for the OCR getting the strange minerals spelt wrong.

My plan once I have the data coming in, is to have it upload to a server, which I can then view from anywhere and use to make searches of the commodities.

I would however like some help completing the application, specifically I require testers, if you are interested, please contact me in the comments below.

Finally, lots of people ask "Why", why make this tool, why not use one of the others out there... Well, I have nothing against the others, I looked at a couple, including EliteOCR and they showed that Tesseract could get the job done, but none of those tools were mine, I've played and used a lot of tools for game, I'm a professional programmer, so I figured I should make a tool which is exactly what I want.

Will I never make this publically available?... Perhaps, but I've had little to no interest thus far.

Elite Dangerous - Trading Tools - OCR - Progress Pt4

Update: You can now support this project at Patreon!

Just an quick update, since this morning, I've been tidying the code, fixing things up to make it work with the actual client, and here's the first basic run....

This is a looping console application, so we press F1 when looking at the navigation console to grab and read the system name, and when docked with the commodities window open we press F2 to grab the station name.

Pressing F11 gives the status of these two strings, and you can press Y/N to confirm the selected names before going any further.

This is the important header information, captured live from the client, the client again can be any resolution, windowed or not, you don't need to do anything special for this, just look at the right pages in the client before pressing the F1/2 button respectively, you keep the focus in your client (so you can be full screen) and my OCR application, in the background, works seamlessly.

Now, the OCR is not quick, nor is it perfect, but here we can see it working, and for my needs this is just the ticket.

Next, the actual commodities, which I'm going to save as XML files all over... And then I need to throw up a reader to take those XML files in and make a database of searchable ccommodities  The main search being you select a commodity you see on screen in large numbers, and the tool will get all the buying stations up in order of the buying price, optimizing that trade for you.

The second search I'd like is to give it say 4 systems, which I see in the client are linked & in jump range even when full, and the tool work out the best trades (top 3 maybe in case there are few of the items) to take between them in a sequence.

Elite Dangerous - Trading Tools - OCR - Progress Pt3

Update: You can now support this project at Patreon!

Having played with my own OCR, I've decided to use Tesseract, however, I'm doing it in an unusual manner.  Because this is all really a learning exercide for me, and to keep the build small, I've put the tesseract API calls into their own EXE, not a DLL, an EXE I can call giving it an image filename and an output text path.

The output is XML, tells me the result and likely text result, handling errors with the image or training data for me and not crashing or causing issues with my application.

This clear division of effort lets me just use the tesseract api example (lepttest) code to do my OCR, whilst I get the skimming of the Commodities actually working.

Then I can revisit the OCR later, or maybe play with my own....

Here's a screen shot of the application "reading" from the screen...

As you can see, this is taking a screen capture of the area of the commodities window live from the client, and it's just updating any commodities it see's in the list...

My capturer also works at any resolution, so you can be fullscreen, windowed, or any resolution in the game, there's no need to be a specific resolution as some other tools require of the Elite client.

I am however struggling with the OCR, I think I need to retrain, or better train, Tesseract for the font used in Elite, but that's a separate problem than my actual tool program, as I've split the OCR out!

Elite Dangerous - Making my First Million

Elite: Making my first million.... 

Lots of my tool writing for Elite is for market data, this is because I'd like to be able to easily turn a profit trading from the beginning, unfortunately in the year 3301 (when the game is set) they've clearly done away with any form of spreadsheet or useful market analysis... I mean, they give you a tab to check a price against a known other location, but you have to have bought the data and... argh it's all so annoying, when we today have tools to find the best buys why doesn't the Elite galaxy?.. Argh...

So, markets and trading aside, how would I go about making my first million?... Simple, here's how (takes a deep breath).

Start out in your Sidewinder, immediately start doing the short hop cargo & data delivery missions, until you have around 15,000.  This can be anything from 10 to 15 missions, as they generally pay around a grand, importantly though run into and out of the same station over and over, so you build reputation with that station.

Once you have friendly status you will start to see "Can you be the hero" type missions, these are where you are tasked to fly out into space and find things lost to the faction, like "Black Box" recordings from destroyed ships, "Art work" from convoys intercepted on their way to the station, "Rebel Transmissions" from opposing factions.

Accept these missions with relish!

Undock and fly to Unknown signal sources, when you land within them you're either going to find opposing ships, the feds or just the cargo flating around.

Obviously, if it's the cargo, scoop it up and fly home, more about that later.

If it's opposing ships, you can slowly learn to fight back, I do fight and defeat upto Cobra Mk III in my sidewinder, more about my fitting later.

If it's the feds however, and this is important for docking, if you are carrying the cargo more often than not that cargo is listed as "stolen", so if the feds (or a station) scan you you will get fined... Don't get fines!... Run away from the feds as fast as you can, never submit to an interdiction with the cargo on board, and if there are feds around when the cargo is found, wait for them to fly away then collect it up.

For docking, come into the station from frameshift and stay at least 8km away, move around at this distance without approaching the station, and align with the docking entrance.

Then, full power to engines, and boost... Request docking permission... and hopefully as they accept you should be about 5km from the opening going pretty fast... Stay aligned, boost again and get through that opening, the moment you pass the blue power curtains you are inside, you can drop your throttle to zero, remove power to your engines and drop your landing gear... this way you shed your speed quickly... A hard pull up or push down on your controls to turn the ship will also shed the speed you built up.

Hopefully you should be inside and can dock now, handing in the cargo for the mission reward.

But importantly you also want to be running these missions out of a station with a Black Market, because if you're sent off for 2 rebel transmissions, but you find 6!... well you can sell the remaining 4 on the black market, and this makes you a LOT of money, more than the mission!

Ancient Artifacts, Black Boxes, Rebel Transmissions and Rare Artworks are the four main items I've been smuggling this way...

If you're forced to undock with these kinds of cargo on board, get as lined up but far from the opening as you can, accellerate and boost out of the power curtains, then boost again as soon as possible, to speed in a straight line away from the station and avoid getting scanned.  Fed ships out there will be your main worry  rather than the instant death of the station opening up on you.

Now, for my fitting, I run the sidewinder as purchased, but have:

1 Pulse Laser (primary fire group) - fixed

1 Cannon (secondary fire group) - gimballed

Removed Basic Discovery Scanner for 2 x Cargo space.

This gives me a total of 6 cargo spaces, and enough punch on the offensive.  I use the laser to take shields down and then hammer targets with the cannon, with the cannon being a limited ammunition store also it forces me to go hand in my bounties and cargo sooner rather than when it's too late.

Other improvements to the ship have been a better set of power generators, power relays, life support, jump drive etc... everything has been slowly upgraded as I've found better, but my fire power has remained the same.

My engaging tactic is based on the shield status, if no shields I get behind the target and open up with the cannon and laser, if shielded I just lay on them with the laser until it's 1/3 of the way and then hammer them down.

An opponent Sidewinder will take (with no shields) maybe 5 cannon shells to go critical and explode.  Eagles take as little as 3.  Cobra's are harder nuts to crack - but I do crack them.

I can, running this set up, earn 100,000 credits in about 45 minutes, depending on how many bounties I hoover up, but just doing cargo one can easily make 16,000 per excusion.

The best trading run I found required me to have a Hauler (12 cargo slots) and 64,000 credits to buy metals and port them off to another station for 14,000 profits per run.  But I was vulnerable to attack, and it was very boring.  With this sidewinder driven approach, I got to experience a bit more of the universe, I experienced markets, black markets, missions and combat... Much more varied.

What was the rub?... Well, with the free sidewinder insurance I risked only my current haul of bounties and cargo each fight/docking... But even so the upgrades to rebuy the whole ship was very cheap, with a 15 light year jump range, a bunch of power and other best in class units my repurchase price is only 7,436 credits.  More than affordable to enjoy and play the started game.

My next challenge is at what credit balance to make the jump to a viper or cobra?... I have my cool first million... I think the viper might be the way to go for this play style... And start kitting it out.