Yet another scouting app

[Doug Frisk]

I whipped up a scouting data collection app for team 2512 (The Daredevils) that they used with some success at the Northern Lights regional. I think you'll find this one to be a bit different than some other scouting apps released heretofore.

It's a Windows 8.1 app, that's probably different enough. You can get it here: http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en...0-e07b769422f1

It records different information than other apps I've seen. During build season, the strategy/scouting group got together and decided that traditional measures like recording 10 point goals, 1 point goals etc. was going to be nearly useless. After all, only one robot in an alliance needs to score a 10 point goal and the number of 10 point goals is meaningless in and of itself.

In addition to recording that specific events happen, the app can differentiate between attempts and successes. If your 5 10 point goals came on 27 shots and took a total of 107 seconds to accomplish you may not actually be a powerhouse. On the other hand, if your robot can manage a floor pickup in 3 seconds with 95% success rate and can perform a robot to robot contact pass in 4 seconds with a 90% success rate you may have an awesome robot for playing a specific role in an alliance.

After you've used the app to record a robot's performance, you end up with about 90 columns of data that the Daredevils imported into tableau for analysis. There's also a second file that much more detailed information but not in an easy to export format feel free to make of it what you will.

I'm attaching the scouting data from the week 2 Northern Lights regional. There were some bugs (since fixed) in the app that caused bogus timing events in some cases, so where you see robots taking negative 5 seconds on average to throw a ball over the truss for example, you can ignore that in the sample data and you shouldn't see it in any new data.

Yeah, I realize the season is half over, but what the heck, I can share.

[Xavbro]

This is very impressive. Downloading it now for my tablet. Great work!!

[TheRamAlakazaam]

Thank you for this... I've been working on something similar just on paper I realized teams have "sweet spots" and this is just great to use.

Well how do you share this information between 5-10 people....we have windows tablets and i'm just wondering if we could synch them somehow.

[Doug Frisk]

Originally Posted by TheRamAlakazaam

Thank you for this... I've been working on something similar just on paper I realized teams have "sweet spots" and this is just great to use.

Well how do you share this information between 5-10 people....we have windows tablets and i'm just wondering if we could synch them somehow.

I was working on Bluetooth sync, but it turns out to be dead simple to use a USB stick. First, you need to make sure that all of the tablets have different names. Then, at the end of the day or at lunch or whenever, plug the USB flash drive into each tablet, swipe up and select copy files. Point the app at the drive and it copies the data. It literally takes 2 minutes to do that with 6 tablets.

The reason you need to ensure different IDs on the tablet is that when you copy data to the destination it's done destructively. So if there are two tablets named "RED1" the second tablet will overwrite the data from the first tablet named "RED1". This is a feature, not a bug by the way, you can pull the data off the tablets every 5 or 6 matches and you don't end up with oodles of files to contend with.

If you have six scouts, you should end up with 12 files on the USB stick. Six named {event name}-all-{Recorder}.csv which have the detailed event data and six named {event name}-sum-{recorder}.csv which have the match data summarized.

Then you can copy the data from the USB stick to whatever system you're doing analysis on where you can import it. Since the data is still on the tablets and on the USB stick, you end up with quite a bit of data redundancy.

Once you have the data in Tableau, some obvious computed fields are to take things like SUM(Truss Throw Successes)/SUM(Truss Throw Attempts) to get a success rate or SUM(Truss Throw Total Time)/SUM(Truss Throw Attempts) to get an average time it takes.

[Wzup4021]

I'm not familiar with Tableau, how does it work and how do you set it up to import/sort the data?

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by TheRamAlakazaam

Thank you for this... I've been working on something similar just on paper I realized teams have "sweet spots" and this is just great to use.

Well how do you share this information between 5-10 people....we have windows tablets and i'm just wondering if we could synch them somehow.

We're using a Bluetooth system to transmit from Android tablets which is then uploaded using a cell link to a server, and then transmitted to smartphone apps. Not quite as sophisticated analysis, as this. We may post a guide on using Bluetooth as another team asked us at regionals about this.

[depth_Finder]

Originally Posted by Wzup4021

I'm not familiar with Tableau, how does it work and how do you set it up to import/sort the data?

1. Get Tableau (http://www.tableausoftware.com/first-robotics) and set it up for a free trial. You can get it registered with one of your team's 5 free keys in TIMS later.

2. Open Tableau and click "Connect to Data" in the upper left corner

3. Click the Microsoft Excel Option (its the 4th one)

4. Find the file, open it, and then click "Go to Worksheet"

5. Play around with it and learn by experimentation (Or, check out the tutorials on the bottom of the page in step one)

6. If you want any more help with Tableau, PM me.