The Instruments

Two autonomous data instruments + shared plumbing. Full business plan: see PLAN.md.

• Observatory — Local-AI hardware cost index: joins used-GPU sold prices with community inference benchmarks → tokens/sec-per-dollar rankings.
• Registry — Cloud-Death Registry: which smart devices work without the cloud, plus the Tombstone Log of cloud shutdowns that bricked hardware (12 events pre-seeded).

Quickstart

1. cp .env.example .env and fill in:
   • TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN / TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID — alerts + digest (leave blank → prints to stdout)
   • SOLDCOMPS_API_KEY — free key from https://sold-comps.com (no card needed)
2. pip install -r requirements.txt (just requests + pyyaml)
3. python run.py initdb — creates data/instruments.db
4. python run.py bench — parses llama-bench files from data/inbox_benchmarks/
5. python run.py prices — pulls sold prices (needs the SoldComps key)
6. python run.py join && python run.py publish — builds site/index.html. Open it.
7. python run.py digest — sends/prints the status digest
8. When happy, install the crontab: cron/crontab.example

Feeding benchmarks

Run llama-bench on any machine (llama.cpp release builds include it):

llama-bench -m model-q4_k_m.gguf -ngl 99 > bench-output.txt

Add # gpu: <card name> as the first line, drop the file in data/inbox_benchmarks/. Community-posted llama-bench tables (r/LocalLLaMA, llama.cpp discussions) work the same way — paste table into a .txt with the header line. Implausible numbers are auto-flagged and excluded from rankings.

Design rules baked in

• Nothing publishes silently wrong: every job records to scraper_runs; 3 consecutive failures of any job → one Telegram alert (not spam). Site always serves last-good data.
• Nothing needs remembering: cron runs jobs; the Monday digest tells you if anything needs you. Silence = healthy.
• The dataset is the asset: everything accumulates in SQLite on your hardware. Marketplaces and sites are replaceable mouths, not the organism.

Layout

common/        config, sqlite, telegram, health tracking
observatory/   cards.yaml (card catalog), price + benchmark ingest, join, publish
registry/      device schema + validator, tombstones.yaml seed, news watcher
digest/        weekly digest
cron/          crontab.example
data/          db, inboxes (runtime, gitignored)
site/          generated static output (gitignored)

Not here yet (next sessions)

• Real site design (publish.py output is a functional ugly table — proof of life)
• r/hardwareswap + backup eBay scraper
• Registry GitHub PR flow + CI validator action
• API metering layer (Foundry phase)