Introducing: CowScout

[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

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]

Originally Posted by 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?

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]

Originally Posted by dag0620

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.

Originally Posted by stevend1994

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]

Originally Posted by Hallry

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

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That site is no longer active.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]

Originally Posted by Jon Jack

That site is no longer active.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]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

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]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

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]

Originally Posted by Jon Jack

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]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

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:

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]

Originally Posted by 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.

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/sh...0&postcount=19
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/download/2321
https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~dwharder/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]

Originally Posted by 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.

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