A New Way to Scout

[1306scouting]

I talked with the lead programmer for CrowdScout today, and got some more details confirmed:

We'll use a database backend (MySQL or similar) to store the data. We'll have an API so that we can take data from many sources over in a standardized format; we'll publish this API for anyone to use with their software, though we may need to set up API keys to prevent server overloading from unintentional traffic floods blocking it for others.

We should have no issues accommodating all the data from every match in every tournament, with one database per year. It turns out FRC actually creates a fairly small amount of data in a season, somewhere in the millions of data points range (Relative to some of the data sets I've worked with, at least.)

The API will just provide a way to upload data; every year we'll have a suggested list of metrics to score by, as well as taking other inputs (we're still rolling ideas around for the custom inputs, so that's not final.)

Data will be distributed to teams by both raw data access (bulk exporting to some storage file) and data processing (running weighting algorithms and so forth). We envision teams as doing their own visualizations/processing beyond that, so we're not going to have a massively complicated GUI with a million different buttons; we could never match the ingenuity of teams in how they want to do their own processing.

(Someone could easily create a frontend and make it public, but we think that's better done locally and that our time and energy is better spent on making a rock-solid reliable backend and great API.)