Android App - FRC Spyder

[Mike Soukup]

Inspired by Tom Saxton's FRC Tracker for the iPhone, I took some time out of the busy build season to create an Android app that serves a similar purpose.

Competition data is aggregated on a server app that Dave Flowerday created to scrape the FIRST results pages and FMS Twitter feed. The Android app queries the server to retrieve 2010 team and event info and store it into a local database. Once scores and rankings are posted, the app downloads those as well and packages it all up in a friendly, viewable format. You can view lists of all the teams & events, filter by your favorites, or filter by the current weekend's events.

You have to update event results manually for now. The long term goal is to update them in the background, but there was not enough time to get that done before the first week of regionals.

You can find the app on the Android Market. Search for "FRC Spyder" and give it a try. You can also follow the frcspyder twitter feed for updates.

[Greg Marra]

Mike,

This sounds absolutely great! I've got it on my phone now, and it looks like it will be a great boon for Android folks at competitions.

If you're interested in incorporating data from The Blue Alliance, let me know and I will get you an API key.

You might also be able to add Photos like FRC Tracker has on iPhone, or maybe even video playback! Many of the videos on TBA are in h.264, which I think Android devices can play.

Any chance you'll open source the application? Maybe others can contribute improvements or bug fixes!

Love it!

[Rick]

Coincidentally, I just got a Droid today. This is a really useful app. When everyone is crowding around the tiny TV screen looking for standings, I can casually take out my phone. Awesome job!

[BradMello]

I love this app! The only capability I would have liked added is the ability to take pictures using the phones camera and set it to display under each teams profile. That way you could take shots of the robots and have them display when looking through the team list.

What do you know, we won our first match!

[Andrew Bates]

I would love if you could integrate with the blue alliance so that we can pull up pictures of any team.

[sportzkrazzy]

Looks sweet. Can't wait to c see it in action on my Hero!

[Mike Soukup]

Thanks everyone. I'll consider adding TBA photos & videos after I get a couple more features implemented. If you have any other feature requests, suggest them and I'll put them somewhere on the to-do list. Also, please let me know if you see any problems or if something doesn't look right on your particular phone. I've tested the app extensively on the Droid & the emulator, but not on any other actual phones. There's a chance a screen may not display quite right since Android runs on so many different platforms and supports multiple resolutions.

Brad, the scores you saw for BAE was some junk data most likely pushed by someone testing the software while setting up. It's gone now, but is bound to show up at another event when they start testing.

Greg, what data do you provide that isn't available in FRC Spyder? If you have something that we're missing, I'm up for adding it.

There are no current plans to open source the application. I need to get a handle on all the features I still want to implement and plan out what else should be added. Maybe in the future, maybe not.

[David Kelly]

At this moment, the updates are failing to download, on the Droid.

[Dave Scheck]

The update seems to be working for me on Droid. Are you seeing errors or just not getting data? If the event hasn't scheduled anything yet there wouldn't be schedule/results/rankings to display.

[Mike Soukup]

Originally Posted by David Kelly

At this moment, the updates are failing to download, on the Droid.

My theory is it's Verizon's network (quick, someone call that guy from the commercials!). I'm seeing problems on my phone too both within the app and from the phone's browser. If I use the emulator, switch my phone to wifi, or use the browser on my laptop, it works perfectly.

My HTTP timeout may have been too aggressive, so I'm putting together a new build that extends it to 30 secs. If the problem is in Verizon's network, this won't fix it, but it may help a little.

[kramarczyk]

Can you attach some notes for each team that can be input by the user? Intent would be for scouting notes. A simple text file would get it done.

[Mahekp15]

Thank you for this app, i have the mytouch and dont know if it works, but it does get the teams that are attending the regional and would be nice to pull up the team and take a pic of it>!

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by Mike Soukup

Greg, what data do you provide that isn't available in FRC Spyder? If you have something that we're missing, I'm up for adding it.

TBA offers robot photos you could offer through the app. The iPhone FRC Tracker offers TBA photos, and new ones can be submitted by users back to TBA for everyone to benefit from.

[Andrew Bates]

Can you make an update option when we are viewing teams? For example if I go to the Global team list, select a team and then select an event unless I've updated on that event's page I can't see most recent results.

Also is there any way to have the app update every time I open it?

Also using it on Droid and Verizon, no problems great work.

[Dave Scheck]

I'll let Mike respond about future versions, but for now what I've been doing is to favorite the events that I'm interested in (long press on the event in the All Events tab), then while on the Favorites tab do an update. It will only update events that are in the Favorites list (same goes for the Current tab).

I've talked with Mike about things that he has planned for FRCSpyder and can't wait to see them implemented.