Introducing: CowScout

[Jon Jack]

Team 1538 is very excited to be opening up our scouting software to the rest of the FIRST community!

Inspired by Kiet Chau’s iScout (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/31482), we initially developed CowScout during the 2010 season for our own private use. Upon seeing the program's success, many people have requested that we make the software available to other teams. Starting later this summer we will be opening CowScout to any team who wishes to use it.

Here are some of CowScout’s features:

Online Scouting Database
CowScout runs off a remote web server so your scouting data is available from any device with internet access. In addition CowScout will save scouting data from past events.

Public and Private Scouting Data
Each team can manage their own data and decide what data they’d like to share with the world and which data they would like to keep private.

Data Analysis
CowScout provides up to date team reports, leader boards, charts, graphs and performance histories.

Event Archive
CowScout features an archive of match results, rankings, awards and OPR for events dating back to 2003. During a live event, CowScout automatically scrapes data from FIRST.

Become a Beta Tester!
Go here to sign up (http://www.cowscout.com)! We will be inviting a select few to help us beta test the new features we have added and have setup a landing page for your team to sign up. Leave us your email address and we'll contact you when space is available.

[Andrew Lawrence]

It seems interesting! I like the graphs it shows. Also, does it rely on member input, or input from an external source, such as a moderator? Besides that, it's looking good! I can't wait until it comes out!

[robodude03]

It seems interesting! I like the graphs it shows. Also, does it rely on member input, or input from an external source, such as a moderator? Besides that, it's looking good! I can't wait until it comes out!

It doesn't solely rely on member input. CowScout has a built in scraper that pulls match data from FIRST. At the moment it calculates OPR data and I am sure other features will be added in the future.

[connor.worley]

It seems interesting! I like the graphs it shows. Also, does it rely on member input, or input from an external source, such as a moderator? Besides that, it's looking good! I can't wait until it comes out!

A mentor can create a team and scouts can create accounts and request to join the team. Once they're in a team they can start entering stats. The data sits in a "temporary" section of the database where a lead scout for the team can approve or delete it as well as make on-the-fly corrections.

[Jeremy Germita]

Really cool, guys! :)

[sammyjalex]

Holy Cows,

This idea sounds really interesting. I love the courage that teams, namely you and the poofs, are displaying to make scouting a full-fledged part of how we collaborate in FRC. I'm really excited to see the early details in the beta.

This program reminds me of an idea that I considered implementing on my team in order to save resources, make scouting more accessible to those that like to or need encouragement to begin dialogue with students from other teams as well as more accessible to the collaborative goals of FIRST, and to begin to fight poor scouting.

Let me know if this has similar qualities:

The team would eliminate the common waste of paper through scouting by only using six laminated sheets and recording both specific objective notes and notes regarding its role with those teams with which it plays both offensively and defensively. After each match, perhaps there would be an extra set of sheets to allow time, this collected information, objective, subjective and relative, would be recorded onto a cloud template on only a single laptop that the team could choose to share with other teams easily following the shared dialogue of the two teams regarding scouting etc. That other team could then input their own information into this document. Ideally, this one document could contain information from almost all teams at the event, allow them to understand their role in the game from the perspective of others and, of course, develop meaningful social relationships between teams more widely than the teams' drive teams or that which is limited to a team social.

When I read about CowScout, this is what first came to my mind-a structural opportunity to share scouting information, a means to limit paper and expensive technology per team and a great way to improve networking, social opportunities for students and as a result the overall quality of scouting.

Best,
Sam

[Andrew Lawrence]

YAY! Beta testing!

[connor.worley]

CowScout is set to be released on January 2nd, 2012. Hope to see you all using it soon!

[Hallry]

CowScout is set to be released on January 2nd, 2012. Hope to see you all using it soon!

And it's now live at www.cowscout.com!

EDIT: And it seems to not be working anymore...

[Steven Donow]

And it's now live at www.cowscout.com!

EDIT: And it seems to not be working anymore...

Still not working? Or is this already outdated. I was able to register and add my team fine, as well as see team lists pulled from events.

[stundt1]

It would be nice to be able to play around with the actual scouting part of cowscout. It says this regional isnt available to scout.

Can we make it available?

[Hallry]

Still not working? Or is this already outdated. I was able to register and add my team fine, as well as see team lists pulled from events.

As was I, but now it just goes back to the 'Coming Jan. 2' page :yikes:

EDIT: It's working for me now here: http://team1538.com/cowscout_beta/index.php

EDIT 2: It's now working here: cowscout.com, the site above no longer works!

[Steven Donow]

As was I, but now it just goes back to the 'Coming Jan. 2' page :yikes:

EDIT: It's working for me now here: http://team1538.com/cowscout_beta/index.php

Weird. What browser/OS are you running? That could be linked. I'm on XP and Chrome.

[Andrew Lawrence]

Great site! I saw it said "Match schedule" in the regional area, and got excited thinking your website could tell the future. :( Oh well. Great site anyways! Can't wait to use it!

Your move, CheesyScout! :p

[thefro526]

Hallry, I used the link you posted registered, etc and it's working fine for me.

Thus far, it seems that CowScout is what we'll be using this year, I set our team up in about 5 minutes while doing a bunch of other stuff - it's so intuitive.

[Nick Lawrence]

CowScout is best scout.

Well done 1538. Seeing this evolve through the beta program was really really cool. Glad to see it finally came to public fruition.

-Nick

[Andrew Lawrence]

I know for sure 256 will be using CowScout this year! And the next one. And the next one. And the next one, unless something better comes out. (Cowscout 2.0?)

[dag0620]

I was really jazzed about this when I played around with it in Beta, and I'm glad to see it finally come out to full release.

I plan on pitching this to the team to try use it as our new scouting system this season.

One question. Do you think there might be an ability at some point to add a custom event so the program could be used at Week 0's and off-seasons?

[Steven Donow]

I was really jazzed about this when I played around with it in Beta, and I'm glad to see it finally come out to full release.

I plan on pitching this to the team to try use it as our new scouting system this season.

One question. Do you think there might be an ability at some point to add a custom event so the program could be used at Week 0's and off-seasons?

Expanding on customization, how are the parameters determined for what info gets scouted? Like, in the demos it showed tubes hung, what if we wanted to get more specific into top row, middle, or bottom? Can that be customized?

[connor.worley]

One question. Do you think there might be an ability at some point to add a custom event so the program could be used at Week 0's and off-seasons?

We plan to add offseasons / VRC sometime after this season.

Expanding on customization, how are the parameters determined for what info gets scouted? Like, in the demos it showed tubes hung, what if we wanted to get more specific into top row, middle, or bottom? Can that be customized?

CowScout lets you look at leader boards for tubes scored low / middle / high. We'll make sure that we collect enough data to accurately represent an alliance's score.

[Jon Jack]

As was I, but now it just goes back to the 'Coming Jan. 2' page :yikes:

EDIT: It's working for me now here: http://team1538.com/cowscout_beta/index.php

That site is no longer active. If you've created a user account on that site, please go to http://www.cowscout.com and recreate your user account and team.

[Chris is me]

That site is no longer active. If you've created a user account on that site, please go to http://www.cowscout.com and recreate your user account and team.

I created an account but was sent an activation link to the beta site that appears to not work. Logging in fails for me.

[Sean Raia]

I created an account but was sent an activation link to the beta site that appears to not work. Logging in fails for me.

Same here.

[Jon Jack]

I created an account but was sent an activation link to the beta site that appears to not work. Logging in fails for me.

That was a prior issue, but has been resolved for a while. Did you create the account from cowscout.com or the team1538.com/cowscout_beta link?

[Chris is me]

That was a prior issue, but has been resolved for a while. Did you create the account from cowscout.com or the team1538.com/cowscout_beta link?

cowscout.com. The beta link appears to redirect you now anyways.

[Jon Jack]

cowscout.com. The beta link appears to redirect you now anyways.

The sites run off of two different databases. I'm pretty sure what's happened is you created your account on the beta site before we redirected it and so you got an email from the beta site. I just checked the databases and you have an account on the beta site, but not the cowscout.com site. Try recreating your account. Sorry for the inconvenience...

[Grim Tuesday]

This is very cool. A couple questions:

How is CCWN calculated? Our team has been trying to figure out how to do something like this for a while, but it never got off the ground. It's good to hear that someone else has done it, but it would be quite interesting to see the math that goes into it. If there is a white paper for this, or OPR calculation available somewhere, I would be much obliged if someone pointed me towards it.

Some feature requests, pulled directly from our scouting databse: (http://www.istvan.us/scouting/team.php?team=639)

We have a dynamically generated graph of the robots performance over time, which is useful, especially in week one regional to see if, maybe, a robot had a problem at the beginning of the competition but it got fixed, and might be a good second pick. Though your system includes this numerically, graphs are a great way to visualize it.

A section for comments, either on the way the robot plays, or just comments in general. We've also had sections on our database listing various stats about the robot: Drive train (a stat) and drive strength, as measured qualitatively by our scouters. If such a feature exists and I don't see it, please point me towards it.

As it is right now, I feel like it is missing a few essential features, but it looks fantastic nonetheless.

[connor.worley]

This is very cool. A couple questions:

How is CCWN calculated? Our team has been trying to figure out how to do something like this for a while, but it never got off the ground. It's good to hear that someone else has done it, but it would be quite interesting to see the math that goes into it. If there is a white paper for this, or OPR calculation available somewhere, I would be much obliged if someone pointed me towards it.

OPR and CCWM are calculated using the exact same algorithm. Honestly, I don't fully understand the math behind it; I actually ported some MATLAB code to PHP. Here are some very useful links:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=484220&postcount=19
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/download/2321
https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~dwharder/NumericalAnalysis/04LinearAlgebra/cholesky/#matlab (https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/%7Edwharder/NumericalAnalysis/04LinearAlgebra/cholesky/#matlab)

The difference between CCWM and OPR is that CCWM estimates a contribution to winning margin, rather than score (just feed it different data).

We have a dynamically generated graph of the robots performance over time, which is useful, especially in week one regional to see if, maybe, a robot had a problem at the beginning of the competition but it got fixed, and might be a good second pick. Though your system includes this numerically, graphs are a great way to visualize it.While we do have graphs for specific statistics, we don't have any sort of graph for overall robot preformance. We'll see if we can implement that.

A section for comments, either on the way the robot plays, or just comments in general. We've also had sections on our database listing various stats about the robot: Drive train (a stat) and drive strength, as measured qualitatively by our scouters. If such a feature exists and I don't see it, please point me towards it.We considered comments, but anticipated that too many would be useless (i.e. "this robot is awesome"). Our team isn't sold on pit scouting, and for now we're going to leave it up to teams to do that on their own. Thanks for the feedback!

[stundt1]

Okay so earlier I created a team and i went back on later and its asking me to join a team ? I dont appear on the team i made last time.

[connor.worley]

Okay so earlier I created a team and i went back on later and its asking me to join a team ? I dont appear on the team i made last time.

The team may have been created on the beta site. Try recreating it.

[stundt1]

okay im trying now. I never went to beta site...

So the first person to add the team is the head scout correct?

[Jon Jack]

okay im trying now. I never went to beta site...

So the first person to add the team is the head scout correct?

Anyone can be the headscout, the person who creates a team is the admin user so they can invite users, approve users who have requested to join their team and change event settings for their team.

[jwfoss]

First of all, let me say thank you for opening this up to the public. This may very well replace the system we used last year, although we will likely still maintain some form of paper data as well.

That said, is there any chance you could provide "Match Prediction" based on OPR/average robot contribution (based on the scouting data input). We did this last year and provided us with a quick comparison of what we were up against, and where we currently stood with our partners and opponents.

Thanks again.

[Hallry]

I see that there is an option to add pictures to teams. Maybe we could use the pictures from the FRC-Designs slideshow of every robot (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=99102) for those?

[Jon Jack]

I see that there is an option to add pictures to teams. Maybe we could use the pictures from the FRC-Designs slideshow of every robot (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=99102) for those?

Teams are more than welcome to upload photos of your robot as well as others. If anyone from FRC-Designs would like to upload those photos, please feel free!

[stundt1]

I was gonna say There is a lot of photos from the FRC tracker app maybe you can somehow get a hold of those? I got like 600 from there by going in the app files... Though the pictures were a little small they still sufficed.

[Mastonevich]

Jon,

This option for scouting looks very promising.

Being a programmer myself, one of the things that concerns me about using it is our lack of ability to get bugs fixed quickly, especially since we would like to use it during a week 1 event. I saw that you had an email mechanism on your website to report bugs. Especially for teams during week 1, what happens if a problem arises? Also, I saw that you beta tested it. How long did you beta test this application?

I know someone is going to say beggars can't be choosers here as you are offering it for free and to everyone. For that I am very grateful, and want to get more information to help our decision to use this.

Great Job on this!

Andrew

[Wizzard of Izz]

I've really enjoyed using this. The picklist feature is going to save me a lot of explanations when I hand it to the drivers.

[CurseofDragon33]

This looks really well done. Thanks for sharing this. It will make my job easier at the events.

[Steven Donow]

Jon,

This option for scouting looks very promising.

Being a programmer myself, one of the things that concerns me about using it is our lack of ability to get bugs fixed quickly, especially since we would like to use it during a week 1 event. I saw that you had an email mechanism on your website to report bugs. Especially for teams during week 1, what happens if a problem arises? Also, I saw that you beta tested it. How long did you beta test this application?

I know someone is going to say beggars can't be choosers here as you are offering it for free and to everyone. For that I am very grateful, and want to get more information to help our decision to use this.

Great Job on this!

Andrew
I agree. Despite the past beta testing, it'd be nice to have at least some pre-week 1 functionality out of this. Maybe a test event of some sorts, especially for some of us that plan on utilizing this as a major aspect of their scouting database, and would love to see what specific match data is gonna be used for this season.

[Matthew Wang]

I've just learned about CowScout, so I have a few questions. I signed up an account on the new website (CowScout.com) but there doesn't seem to be any option for me to test out the system. I'm curious to learn how to use it and see how the whole things works. If it's something I can get hands on with, maybe my team can use it this year.

Where can I go to test it out?

[Jon Jack]

Sorry for the delayed response, folks build season has kept us pretty busy.

We will be releasing a Rebound Rumble update to CowScout after stop build day (probably Friday or Saturday). When we do this, we will also open a 2012 test event that will be open for a few weeks. This will give teams a chance to play with CowScout and see what data we will be collecting as well train scouts for the upcoming season.

[Cw1671]

i was wondering if we make our own scouting forms on cowscout or if you guys make them and we all just use the same form

[connor.worley]

i was wondering if we make our own scouting forms on cowscout or if you guys make them and we all just use the same form

As of now, teams use the same scouting forms. Keep in mind, however, that we'll make sure that the form collects enough data to accurately represent score.

[DavidGitz]

CowScout looks like a great program! We are going to investigate using it at our next Regional. After looking at this for a bit, I have a few questions:
1. My team's (1208) are inaccurate in Cow Scout but are accurate on TBA, it looks like it is missing 2 of the matches we lost in Qualifications, 4 of the matches we won in Eliminations and the Finals are un-scored (0-0) resulting in ties. I also noticed that similar inaccuracies exist on our alliance partner, 1769.
2. I have seen people discuss the different graphs that are available, how do you get to these?
3. The Pick List function is interesting. It seems that during the manual choice portion of it, it selects teams out of order?
4. Is the Test Event still up? The main thing I am curious about is if the Pick List feature will pull data off the Scouting data as well as the OPR data if the Scouting data is available.
5. Will there be separate events for each Division at Championships? If not, how is that managed?
6. Is there a manual available anywhere? If not, what do these fields mean and how are they determined:
CCWM
Avg. Def Score
Avg. WM
+/-

Thanks guys, again this looks fantastic! Great job.

[Jon Jack]

1. My team's (1208) are inaccurate in Cow Scout but are accurate on TBA, it looks like it is missing 2 of the matches we lost in Qualifications, 4 of the matches we won in Eliminations and the Finals are un-scored (0-0) resulting in ties. I also noticed that similar inaccuracies exist on our alliance partner, 1769.


The way we're scraping data is different from TBA. IIRC TBA is using the twitter feed to collect match results. We're scraping the FIRST website. There are a couple regionals from last weekend that were not scrapped correctly and we're looking at why that is. San Diego scraped fine, but Alamo and NH didn't...


2. I have seen people discuss the different graphs that are available, how do you get to these?


The graphs are available only when there is scouting data that your team collected or is being shared by another team.


3. The Pick List function is interesting. It seems that during the manual choice portion of it, it selects teams out of order?


There is a reason teams are selected out of order. The picklist manager is sorting teams based on an algorithm we have in place. Because of this the teams it's asking you to chose between will not be in order.


4. Is the Test Event still up? The main thing I am curious about is if the Pick List feature will pull data off the Scouting data as well as the OPR data if the Scouting data is available.


At the moment there is not a test event up. There is a way you can scout an event a day prior to your event. I will talk about this later in the week.


5. Will there be separate events for each Division at Championships? If not, how is that managed?


Because FIRST sees each division as a separate tournament, each division will be ran as an independent tournament.


6. Is there a manual available anywhere? If not, what do these fields mean and how are they determined:
CCWM
Avg. Def Score
Avg. WM
+/-


We are currently working on a manual, but it probably won't be available until after the season. I can explain what these are:

CCWM = Calculated Contribution to the winning margin
It's similar to OPR except rather than using the score of the alliance, we use the winning margin of the alliance. Say in an example match, you have:

Team A, Team B, Team C and they score 100 points. In that same match you have Team D, Team E, Team F and they score 75 points.

Since OPR is the contribution of each alliance member towards the final score, the OPR equation would be:

Team A + Team B + Team C = 100
Team D + Team E + Team F = 75

In CCWM, we're finding out how much each team in contributing to the winning margin. So we replace the alliance score with the winning margin of the alliance. So the equation would look like:

Team A + Team B + Team C = 25
Team D + Team E + Team F = -25.

Avg. Def Score
This is the average score of the team's opponents.

Avg. WM
This is the team's average winning margin.

+/-
This is a statistic borrowed from the NHL and the NBA. It measures a team's effect on a match. In the NHL and NBA it's calculated like this:

Every time a team scores a point all the players on the court (or ice) get a +1 to their +/-. Every time the opposing team scores a point those same players get a -1 towards their +/-.

For example,
Say Kobe Bryant comes off the bench with 2 minutes left in the game and the Lakers are trailing 80-75. The Lakers end up winning the game 95-85. Kobe's +/- for that part of the game would be +5 (15 points for the Lakers - 10 points scored by the opposing team). When you total the +/- of all the minutes Kobe was in the game that would be his +/- for the game.

[sanddrag]

I'm curious what teams are using for internet connectivity for their CowScout implementations.

[DavidGitz]

Ok thanks for all the information! We are going to test it out this weekend while watching a webcast regional to see if it will work for us.

[DavidGitz]

Ok thanks for all the information! We are going to test it out this weekend while watching a webcast regional to see if it will work for us.

Is it possible to scout an event that your team isn't attending?

[stundt1]

It wont let me scout the regional at all it says its not available. Why can this be fixed?

[Jon Jack]

It wont let me scout the regional at all it says its not available. Why can this be fixed?

Sorry about that. We forgot up setup those events for scouting. Should be good to go now.

[ahollenbach]

Wow. This is totally amazing. You guys honestly did an incredible, amazing, wonderful job with this, and I'm sure many, many teams will be thanking you in the years to come. Great job :D

[DavidGitz]

I found the following bugs with this software:
1. The Offensive/Defensive score for a team is reported to be 0/10. For the team in question I put in random numbers for both (not 0) and this still is reported as 0.
2. On a mobile phone, specifically a Samsung Galaxy S the + arrows on the right are about a half width lower than the - arrows on the left. Not a big deal but a little confusing.
3. It seems there is a delay in using the arrow buttons between pressing it and pressing it again. It may be designed this way though.
4. Is it possible to develop it to put general notes in for a team?

Again, great job guys, I'm going to recommend that we use this.

[charlie.drummer]

Where from the FIRST site does CowScout get the scores for each match? Does it take it off of a page like this, http://www2.usfirst.org/2012comp/Events/DMN/matchresults.html or is there another place that the information is stored?

[Bob Steele]

I looked at the data from my team (1983)
It shows erroneous data... for instance it counted two ties that did not exist.
It is counting the third match of any qualifying round as a 0-0 tie if one team won the first two and no third match was played.
It also did not count two losses we had in the qualifying round as part of our qualifying match score. It did count all of the losses for the total but didn't count them during qualifying...

Can you explain this? I am not complaining.. just wondering if this is a glitch that could lead to other issues with rankings.

thanks
Coach Steele

[Ninja_Bait]

I looked at the data from my team (1983)
It shows erroneous data... for instance it counted two ties that did not exist.
It is counting the third match of any qualifying round as a 0-0 tie if one team won the first two and no third match was played.
It also did not count two losses we had in the qualifying round as part of our qualifying match score. It did count all of the losses for the total but didn't count them during qualifying...

Can you explain this? I am not complaining.. just wondering if this is a glitch that could lead to other issues with rankings.

thanks
Coach Steele

This is true for 694 as well. We have overall 5-5-1 (The one tie is a 0-0 unplayed elims match, not a huge problem), but that should be 5-3-0 in quals and 0-2-1 in elims, not 5-0-0 and 0-5-1 as CowScout claims.

[stundt1]

Can you open up week 4 events for scouting tonight?

[Jon Jack]

Can you open up week 4 events for scouting tonight?

Yes we will be activating the week 4 events today sometime.

As for the win/loss/tie issues. It's a problem in that way we capture matches. FIRST displays 3 matches per round when the elimination schedule is posted. Therefore the scraper captures all three matches. We will go trough and remove those matches whic will fix the problem.

[swwrobotics]

Why when I try to edit the picklist does the whole screen go blank?

[Grim Tuesday]

Why when I try to edit the picklist does the whole screen go blank?

We're at the DC regional as well and are unable to create a picklist either. This is somewhat disappointing.