[FRC Blog] FRC Community Tools Developers Conference for FMS API

[Hallry]

Posted on the FRC Blog (http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/blog), 8/27/14: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/blog-FRC-Community-Tools-Developers-Conference-for-FMS-API

FRC Community Tools Developers Conference for FMS API

Blog Date: Wednesday, August 27, 2014 - 14:59

Please see the note below from the FRC Engineering Team:

There are so many community developed tools that FRC teams and fans use throughout the season to keep tabs on their favorite teams and events, way too many to list. Until now, developers of those tools have been forced to scrape webpages or Twitter feeds for the data. This is not the best way for us to make the needed data available to those developers, and we want to change it.

Developing an API to allow developers access to event data is one of our key goals for this season. But, we want to make sure we’re getting developers the data they need in the way they need it. So, we’re going to be hosting an FRC Community Tools Developers Conference. This conference will give the FRC staff members developing the API the chance to hear directly from the users to ensure it’s everything we want it to be.

The conference is tentatively scheduled for the week of September 15, using an online tool like GoToMeeting.

If you have developed a tool and want to be a part of the conference, please fill out this survey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MW52SLS) telling us your name, email address, and the community tool you’d like to use the API for. The survey also asks what time of day works best for you. Once we’ve collected names, we’ll nail down an exact day and time. We’ll also send out a follow-up survey to pre-collect questions to be answered during the event. Please fill out the participation survey by 9/5.

[AllenGregoryIV]

Probably one of my favorite announcements of the summer. I love that they are embracing all the work the community has already done and working to make it easy for them to get better information.

Now if we could find away to ensure high quality video out of every event, I would be a very happy man.

[AustinShalit]

It is great to know FIRST is listening to community requests. This and the new FMS Lite are great things that the community should have access to.

[Clinton Bolinger]

Now if we could find away to ensure high quality video out of every event, I would be a very happy man.

+3847

-Clinton-

[Jon Stratis]

I'm really looking forward to this. I'm hoping we can utilize this to make calculating rankings (specifically for the MN State Championship, but also applies to districts, I would think) easier and less error prone.

[Jim Zondag]

This is great, I am very happy to see this happening.

[rcmolloy]

I mentioned the likelihood of this happening to Adam last night while we realized that the twitter feed wasn't the best for what we wanted. He said it was likely but not guaranteed.

With this announcement, I am super excited to have the potential of grabbing all data that we need to make OPR even more accurate without having to deal with a least square regression for estimation.

Hopefully I will be able to attend the meeting.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Woah, awesome!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvMQWte5pik

[AdamHeard]

I'd like raw access to the sub scores; auto, tele, assists, whatever for each game.

[Eugene Fang]

I'd like raw access to the sub scores; auto, tele, assists, whatever for each game.

You will at Chezy Champs. :)

[Andrew Schreiber]

Approximate locations for teams AND events. Honestly, city level data would be great.

[Basel A]

Looking forward to (and really hoping for) positive results from this meeting. I have a feeling all the requests will overwhelm them, but FIRST has been behind the times on this, so to some degree they deserve it.

[Nemo]

This is awesome. I don't know how to interface with an API, but I am definitely the type of person who appreciates cool data when it becomes more accessible and detailed.

[karomata]

This is awesome! Scouting will get a whole lot easier!

[Jessica Boucher]

YAAAAAAAAAS

[username115]

This is something I've been waiting for. Looking forward to the conference.

[plnyyanks]

The conference is live now, for those of you who can't make it, I'm keeping some quick notes here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-G_SXqnAd92kfry7TxikTQECY4Ag5Y0i5L-yL8FCids/edit?usp=sharing)

[scca229]

The conference is live now, for those of you who can't make it, I'm keeping some quick notes here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-G_SXqnAd92kfry7TxikTQECY4Ag5Y0i5L-yL8FCids/edit?usp=sharing)

Thanks! Looking great.

[SoftwareBug2.0]

Has anyone else had the meeting program lock up their machine?

[forbes]

Thanks for sharing your notes.

[g_sawchuk]

Has anyone else had the meeting program lock up their machine?
This didn't happen to me, maybe the software is incompatible with your computer? Collin also said that he'd be releasing the audio recording of the conference, so anyone who didn't attend can listen to it later. I can probably answer some questions as well if anyone has some.

[Jon Stratis]

Has anyone else had the meeting program lock up their machine?

Didn't happen to me... I listened to the whole thing through an app on my phone - it worked out quite well, and let drive around doing other stuff I had planned for the day.

Overall, I think they're taking the right approach with the whole project, and can't wait to test it out.

[SoftwareBug2.0]

This didn't happen to me, maybe the software is incompatible with your computer? Collin also said that he'd be releasing the audio recording of the conference, so anyone who didn't attend can listen to it later. I can probably answer some questions as well if anyone has some.

I'm not sure why it would be incompatible with my computer. I was on using Windows 7 on a pretty average Dell laptop. On the positive side, the sound quality was good.

I'm looking forward to the recording. The notes in the Google doc were also helpful.

[techboi]

For those that weren't at the online webinar, they said we should sign up on this website for announcements instead of emails:

https://usfirst.collab.net/sf/projects/first_community_developers/

And it looks like the first announcement is up!

https://usfirst.collab.net/sf/frs/do/listReleases/projects.first_community_developers/frs.frc_events_api_documentation

[Doug Frisk]

For those that weren't at the online webinar, they said we should sign up on this website for announcements instead of emails:

https://usfirst.collab.net/sf/projects/first_community_developers/

And it looks like the first announcement is up!

https://usfirst.collab.net/sf/frs/do/listReleases/projects.first_community_developers/frs.frc_events_api_documentation

Looks very nice. I'll be exercising that in the morning.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Looks very nice. I'll be exercising that in the morning.

Wouldn't bother. Data is garbage. But it's useful for stubbing out apps :) Time to fire up the editor and build something.

[Doug Frisk]

Wouldn't bother. Data is garbage. But it's useful for stubbing out apps :) Time to fire up the editor and build something.

I expect the data to be garbage at this point. Hopefully they'll take a couple of regionals and a couple of district events from last year and republish them using the new format.

[Andrew Schreiber]

I expect the data to be garbage at this point. Hopefully they'll take a couple of regionals and a couple of district events from last year and republish them using the new format.

Mmk, just wanted to make sure you didn't go into it expecting real data.

[plnyyanks]

I'm pretty impressed with what's up so far. It seems the spec covers all the data that I could feasibly want (and more!).

There's really only two feature requests I can think of (which I'll put up on the tracker at some point):
- It would be nice to have a single endpoint to get all of an event's matches, with score data when available. Currently, it seems like I'd have to do a request to get the event schedule and then do a second request for the results and overlay the two. It shouldn't be too bad to have an endpoint just like the results one, but returns all matches and nulls out the scores for the unplayed ones.
- Push notifications would be awesome. But I understand those aren't a high priority at the beginning. Just keep them in mind for later while designing the system