Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

As promised, FRC Spyder has been updated for the 2011 season. You can download it from the Android market.

The Android app pulls aggregated event data from our server into a local DB which the app displays in a convenient format. You can then view the results for every event and see where each team is playing this year. It also includes a widget and the ability to periodically update event results in the background. The app also includes archived data from the 2010 season.

The feature I'm most excited about is one we just wrapped up. We added the ability to register for push notifications for score updates for up to 5 teams. This means that you'll get a message in the notification bar when a match is scored for one of your registered teams, typically within 5-10 seconds of the match being scored. This feature requires Android 2.2 or later because it uses the push framework that was added in Froyo.

I hope you like it. If you want to get notified about future updates, follow us on twitter.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Mike,
Do you have an updated iPhone app on the way as well?

I really enjoyed the push notification that the app provided last year. It actually tipped us to the winner of many matches before FIRST revealed them in the Championship finals.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Thanks for the continued development of this App. It was really useful last year and I expect I will be using it a lot again this year.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

We're not making any promises about the iPhone version, but it's possible for next weekend.

Score push notifications are great, aren't they? I was envious of the iPhone version last year and was really happy when Google added push notifications to Android over the summer. I've been able to keep track of my favorite teams scattered across events while at work just by glancing at my phone when it beeps.

You're welcome. I'm glad others find it as useful as I do. Don't forget to tell all your friends who are interested in the latest match results & rankings to install it.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

This is a delightful app, and I'm quite enjoying it. It does appear to have a glitch on three digit scores, though (or something has gone funky on my phone). Match 47 at FLR had a score of Red 122 to Blue 19. The app shows 12 to 19, with red winning. Q43 at FLR failed differently (0 to 102) and is showing 0 over a 10 in red and 2 in blue.

Oops. Bad engineer, no cookie. I should have mentioned I'm on an HTC EVO Shift running Android 2.2. I can provide more detailed versioning info if needed.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

I can report that I have the same issues,

Moto Droid: Running Cyanogen Mod V 6.1.2

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Me too. When will this get fixed? Oh yeah, that's my job. I noticed it when 2056 scored 102 points.

It's a problem with the size of the text box that I use to display the score. Last year's scores never got to 3 digits so I made it only 2 digits wide. I forgot to test with 3 digits this year. Oops. It's a simple fix; I'll push a new version to the market as soon as I get some time tonight.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Thanks for the quick response!

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Have you gotten out the update to fix 3-digit scores? I'm still having a problem with them, or does it take a few days to make it through to the market.

The only thing that I wish this app had was a picture of each robot. I realize that finding a picture of each robot manually would be ridiculous, but you might be able to get the ones that people upload to TIMS. I also realize that downloading all those pictures would take a long time and take a lot of space, but making it so that the user can optionally download each picture individually from each team page or allowing them to download the pictures for all of the 'favorite' teams would be a good compromise. This is just a suggestion and I still really appreciate all the effort you have put into this great app.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

I had an update pop up today and it looks like 3 digit scores are displaying properly for me (I didn't use the app yesterday so I never saw them display improperly).

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

I went to the market and found the update this morning and it works fine now.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

This app was great when we were working on our robot backup pieces and couldn't watch the live Alamo regional feed because it was blocked by our school district. It was fantastic to get the live updates. :)

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

I found my problem, my Market app didn't see my installation of FRC Spyder (even though I installed it through the market yesterday) so it didn't alert me to any updates. I reinstalled it from the market and now the 3 digit scores all work. Thanks again for this great app.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Ditto on the thanks. I was wishing I had it this weekend, but never found time to look for it. Got it installed now and am ready for week 2!

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Thanks for the update. Is there a way to bump up the number of teams we can get notifications for?

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Maybe after the second week of events. We're using Google app engine for our server and Google C2DM for push notifications, both of which have limits (CPU, bandwidth, number of messages per day, etc), some hard and some that lead to us getting charged. I don't want to set limits too high, then go over our quotas. Once we get a better understanding of how close we're coming to the quotas, we'll crank the limit up if we think it's safe.

I'm surprised no one noticed the small bug with RPs. I foolishly thought that RPs were a sum instead of an average, so we truncated the RPs instead of giving the value posted on the official rankings. I'm used to VEX's rules which use the sum, and IMHO is a much better method since it makes the typical "how many RPs do we need to overtake the team in front of us" question trivial.

Look for an update in a day or two that fixes the RP bug. It won't include any other changes since I need to help the team get ready for our first event in Wisconsin this weekend.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Mike,
In another thread FRC Spyder was mentioned as showing which matches minibots made a difference in winning the match. I'm getting old and can't seem to find anything about minibots. Was he mistaken or is my "old timers" acting up again?

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

The reference was to FRC-Spy which shows the bonus points earned in each match

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

That'd be great!

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Would it be possible to port this to webOS, much of our team has Pre's and this app often updates faster than the other available rankings.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Would it also be possible to add an 'award' listing for each event as well? (As in Chairman's, Winners, Finalists, Woody Flowers, Rookie All-Star, Rookie with high Qualifying Points, Coopertition, Website, Engineering Inspiration, etc., all of those)

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Not going to happen, sorry. I don't have a WebOS phone and I have no desire to develop WebOS applications. I'm an Android only guy, my bi-weekly paycheck comes from Motorola.

There have been a few requests for this, I'll see if I have the time to add awards.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

While we're at it with the requests, how bout a widget to cycle through favorite teams instead of just favorite events?

Love this app Mike, everyone on the team with Android phones uses the heck out of it. Thanks for the work you put in to make it.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Now you're just piling on ;) . Like all other requests, I'll look into it. It sounds like a great feature, but I need to read up on how to implement multiple widgets for a single app.

I'm glad all the Poofs are enjoying it. Too bad San Diego wasn't pushing score updates to twitter this weekend. I wasn't able to get notices for 254's matches.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Glad to know it wasn't just me! Thanks for the great app :)

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

I'd still love to see an update to the iPhone version if possible.

Great app otherwise.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

How about an option to have all events marked as favorites?

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Agreed with Travis, haha

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Thanks for making this app possible. I've been using it tons and rely on this app to keep myself posted.

It was always great when I'd get the score before our alliance or opponents standing next to us, they thought it was crazy that I knew the score before it got posted on the board :P

I do have some suggestions/problems which I have noted during the regionals...

1) When you update the entire app from the top-tier, all of your favorite events and teams get wiped.

2) Saturday morning of the Seattle Cascade regional the scores stopped coming for some reason. In fact, it currently lacks most of Saturday's Quals and even the Elims...

3) Thursday night, when the FIRST schedule was released for the Autodesk Oregon regional, it was posted incorrectly (all of the matches). In fact, it continued to be entirely inaccurate until around an hour in on Friday (If I remember correctly). However, it got fixed and worked great the rest of the regional.

4) When you get pushed a score notification for a team's match, when you select that update bar, the notification goes away and does not bring you to the app to view the match. It acts only as a reminder for you to check your app for the results...

I don't want to sound as if these are complaints, I just wanted my feedback to be available. Like I said, I love this app and I use it a lot and hope it provides as much help in St. Louis as it has the rest of the season.

Thanks again!

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Actually this was a problem with the FIRST system, not with the app. The FIRST website stopped updating, so no information was going through. I was trying to watch the scores very closely, and it was a little frustrating... :P

This app is so great to keep updated! :D

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Mike works on the Android app side while I work on the backend server & iPhone versions, so I'll let Mike comment more on 1 and 4, but here's my brief answers:
Yes, this is a known issue.
The behavior of this is that clicking on the notification in the dropdown opens the app and starts an update of that event. If this is not working for you please let us know what phone you're using and any other relevant information you have (Android version, etc).

2 and 3 are mostly my area of responsibility, so here's my answers for those:
The reason is that the Cascade regional stopped publishing data from the event. If the regionals aren't publishing it we can't get it.
No, the full results for Cascade have been available in the app since FIRST posted them last Monday afternoon. Use the menu button and select "Update Results" when you're viewing that event.
This isn't an issue with FRC Spyder - we use whatever data is published by FIRST. I didn't see the match list in question, but I'm assuming they regenerated the match list on Friday morning for some reason making the one uploaded Thursday night invalid.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Once again, great app. One request - is it possible on the Schedule list and Results list to click on a match and have the Team info come up for just those teams as they do when you select the Teams button? Sometimes it's hard to remember which teams are from where, etc.

Thanks again for this!

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Do you have any update about a possible iphone version coming out?

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

I submitted a version today. No promises on when it may be approved.

The lack of an iPhone version so far this year is because of the large difference in effort and cost for developing for iPhone versus Android. Android development is free and relatively easy, iPhone development is costly and more difficult. I was the only person on the development team who used an iPhone last year and I have since upgraded to an Android device.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

I didn't know the disparity between developing for iphone versus android was that large. Either way thanks for all the work you put into this!

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

This may be partially due to the fact that I'm running it on a rooted base. I'm currently using a MyTouch Slide 3G with Cyanogen Mod. This isn't really a major issue though.

Thanks again for everything!

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

This app was very helpful for keeping up to date with both the Seattle and Oregon regionals, thank you all for your great work with this app. After using it for these two events, the biggest thing I wish it had was an indication when a team got a red card. It is slightly confusing when looking at a team's match results and seeing that they have won a certain number of matches and lost a certain number of matches but having the rankings not match.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

The issue is that this data is not published by FIRST. Mention it at your post-season forum, if enough of us do maybe FIRST will find a way to clearly indicate surrogates and DQs in the match results or Twitter feeds next year.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Thanks for all of the comments Navid.

Yes, I discovered this one a couple weeks ago; it'll require a bit of work to fix. However, there's no reason for you to run an update from the main screen, all it does is grab the team & event lists, it doesn't pull down any event results. You should update from the event list or an event's page.

As Dave said, it should take you to the event screen and start an update to grab new event results. Does anyone else have the same problem as Navid?

Sorry for the lack of updates & new features recently. I've been busy getting ready for my team's competitions and with other higher priority projects. Hopefully I'll get something out for Championship, but no guarantees.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Interesting choice of words.. :p

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

The 2011 iPhone version has been out for about 2 weeks, you can find it in the app store. Sorry it took so long, but we were working on other projects.

There will not be any more Android updates this year. We were busy turning FRC Spyder into VEX via in time for the VEX World Championship last weekend so there wasn't any spare time for FRC work. We'll have a new & improved version next year though. Until then, tell your friends to download the iPhone & Android versions and to register for score notifications.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Mike,

I think I speak for the entire Android/FIRST community, "Thank you."

This app was a huge help in keeping track of teams, schedules, rankings and all the rest and it made my life at competitions a LOT easier. We owe you one. (You can define what "one" is, just keep cheap! lol)

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Agreed, this app is awesome! I'd preferred the FRC Tracker app before this season, but I've quickly gotten used to FRC Spyder as well. Neither is perfect, but here's a few suggestions that are on that side that I'd love to see on this side:
1) OPR and DPR rankings for an event
2) Selecting a team in the rankings sends you to their team page (instead of results at that event). More of a preference, because in both you can get to the other one with just a click.
3) Elim Result in team page (W, F, S, Q)

LOVE that there's RS in the rankings! Maybe an option to rank by RS (and OPR and DPR if you put those in?)

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

I agree with your second suggestion but I really like the simplicity of FRC Spyder. It's got the information you need in a clean format, without anything extraneous.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

The division lists came out a while ago, when can we expect to see the team lists updated for each division?

(I keep updating daily, man I love this app :D)

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

One problem I had with Vex Via is whenevery I did an update, my favorites would be wiped.

I would suggest to allow more teams for sore notifications and to be taken to the team you recieved the notification for when you tap the notification.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

As soon as FIRST updates their event website with the divisions you'll be able to get the team lists. http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...nt.aspx?id=432

When you're updating results, you don't want to update from the top menu. That will wipe out your favorites like you saw. Instead, go somewhere in the "By Event" options and update from there.

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

[quote=Dave Scheck;1055131]As soon as FIRST updates their event website with the divisions you'll be able to get the team lists. http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...nt.aspx?id=432/QUOTE]

How about:
http://frclinks.frclinks.com/e/arc
http://frclinks.frclinks.com/e/cur
http://frclinks.frclinks.com/e/new
http://frclinks.frclinks.com/e/gal

Re: Android app FRC Spyder - 2011
 

Division team lists should be good now. Championship divisions require an extra parameter for the team list URL that we didn't have.