A Challenge: Let's Gather Robot Info!

[Vermeulen]

So if I understand correctly, this is basically TBA except about the robot itself instead of the record? If so, that sounds like a great idea. Not only does it help scouting hugely, but it can also provide help to future team members who want to know what we did in X year (unfortunately, documentation hasn't been our strong suit).

Some problems I have with the DB:

On the Breakaway tab, it has wrong CMP info for our team. Very, very minor annoyance.

My biggest problem: Either the edit button doesn't exist, or it's in some weird place that I can't find.

[penguinfrk]

Originally Posted by Vermeulen

So if I understand correctly, this is basically TBA except about the robot itself instead of the record? If so, that sounds like a great idea. Not only does it help scouting hugely, but it can also provide help to future team members who want to know what we did in X year (unfortunately, documentation hasn't been our strong suit).

Some problems I have with the DB:

On the Breakaway tab, it has wrong CMP info for our team. Very, very minor annoyance.

My biggest problem: Either the edit button doesn't exist, or it's in some weird place that I can't find.

Once you log in (which registering does not automatically do), the edit button appears both at the top and at the bottom of the robot info page.

Is it possible to customize the OPR pie charts to display X number of teams? Is it possible to have an all-time list (every team?) across all regionals? I think those would be major improvements, since navigation from one team to another has intermediate steps in between (search page, competition page, etc.)

[timothyb89]

Originally Posted by Vermeulen

My biggest problem: Either the edit button doesn't exist, or it's in some weird place that I can't find.

You need to make an account and login before you can edit - essentially so you don't need to fill out a CAPTCHA every time you want to go and fill in any info. Once you do, an edit link should appear on all the robot information pages, it's hidden up until then. My apologies for not making that a bit more clear.

Originally Posted by penguinfrk

Interesting!

I haven't messed around with it too much, but at a glance, some critiques:

• There is no distinction between the teams that win and lose in the finals in the overview of the team (where it says "Progressed to").
• There are duplicate event entries on the team page for 2011 games.
• You are not logged in upon account creation. It's a one time thing, and I'm probably too picky , but it confused and bugged me for a bit.
• I'm not sure about the intent of the robot pages. I assume the information should be updated from event to event as the robot is developed, so all older information should be overridden.
• Should there be a distinction between starting configuration and maximum extended dimensions? Maybe separate fields.
• Units of measurement aren't allowable for the robot specs, only viewable in small font at the bottom of the robot page.
• I found it strange that videos are the only allowable multimedia. Could pictures be added too?
• The video URL isn't a hyperlink on the page. For those of us that are lazy...

Overall, I like it a lot! It's really intuitive to use. I'll definitely show it to our scouting team.

Some awesome points! Several of those I've been looking at already - videos will be thumbnails with links to the embed page soon, and with any luck I'll figure out a way to make picture uploads happen. The reason videos have come before pictures... well, videos are just YouTube URLs which are much easier to handle . Duplicate entries are definitely a bug which I'll be working on today (haven't gotten around to it yet because it was pretty harmless, just annoying...), as well as adding more info to that section, as with auto-login after registering. That should be working, but we all know how that usually turns out .

You're correct about the robot pages, too: currently the plan is to keep the final info about the robot, and that should probably be a little more clear. If there's anyone who'd like to see us go about that in another way, I'd love to hear suggestions. It would be cool to see how the robot develops throughout the season, but that could be tricky to make happen without proper planning. I'll look more into being able to specify units as well, at the time it seemed like an obvious choice but there's definitely some good reasons to support different units.

Max extended size would also be pretty cool, and could be really helpful for robots that would extend horizontally for defensive purposes - I saw one at CO and it sort of blew my mind, and currently we don't really have a way to show that.

Some other fields that are being mulled over:

• Programming language used (fun stats here?)
• Can the bot pick up tubes off the ground?
• Max extended dimensions
• insert creative field ideas here...

I'll also be taking a look at the global OPR charts, too - comparing them could be interesting, and I've been thinking up an OPR-based replacement for BBQ/Sauce for a little while now which could help out as well. I'll see what I can do, because there's definitely some more interesting things we can do with an awesome stat like OPR!

Anyway, thanks for the interest! I'll be working on the suggestions soon!

(Sorry for anything redundant, I was writing this post while others happened)

Random update: Looks like the database server decided to bite it during the night, we've been getting more traffic than usual and still need to iron out some problems It's fine now, though.

Another random update: Wow! We've already gotten around 163 info pages in 12 hours! Keep up the awesome work guys!

[timothyb89]

Just a quick update - we've fixed a lot of errors and started anonymous editing to make editing easier for everyone. Hopefully we can keep the information coming!

Thanks again everyone, we're making some great progress!