Scouting Network Brainstorm

[Jack]

Here is a running list of ideas....

Please reply with any ideas you have. At this first point, no idea is stupid. :)

The "List":

Overall Goals:

• Project does not belong to one person/team! (-That's for me... I'm just helping to get this thing rolling... It will be all FIRST Teams to keep it going & Design)
• "contain every possible feature" :)
• Fully Customizable for different teams needs

Collected Data:

• USFIRST Match Results
• "Team Data" - Data collected once, in the pits
• "Match Data" - Collected each match on the playing teams - Should Include both Practice Rounds and Qualifying (sp?) Matches
• Picture of EVERY robot In the pits
• Pictures of Robots on the field
• Close-up Pics of Special Parts of a Bot
• Match Videos (SOAP?? :) )

Data Collection Types:

• Paper Data Collection
• Palm OS Data Collection
• Win CE Based Data Collection
• MS Access Data Collection
• File Maker Data Collection

"Network System":

• Have access to the data on a public computer to teams at regionals & Nats.
• "Master DB" Located on one site/server
• "Master DB" Located on multiple sites/servers
• XML for data transfer/sync'ing

Ok.. I think that's about it for now. If you get an idea, throw up a quick post and i'll add it. I think we can give this about 2 weeks+ for some ideas to come out & more people to find this.

Edit: I decided to break the "list" into categorys

Jack & The Average FIRST Scouter

[Lindsey]

For the match data there should be to types practice and elim.
I think team data should have a picture of the robot

Great list so far
Lindsey

//Added to the list - Jack

[Josh Hambright]

Images of each robot would also be cool.

It would compliacte things and requir alot more storage space but pictures of both individual components on the robot that are significant or unique, pictures of the robot in the pits and pictures of robots out on the field in matches.

Images was a big reason we developed our scouting database after accidently picking a not so great alliance in a competition last year because it was on my list of teams and i didn't remeber the robot cuz i didn't see a picture of it and i rember seeing them in a match...to make a long story short their battery fell right out the back of the robot during the elimination rounds...

Pictures of great but they have to be both pit and in action...ie when we had a picture of 378 that had been on the net and didn't notice the wings they had until it was hitting the wall in autonomous and bringing the whole wall down.

//Added to the List - Jack

[Jack]

Does anyone have any cool ideas of how to integrate this Scouting DB with the CD forums?

[jon]

Originally posted by Jack
Does anyone have any cool ideas of how to integrate this Scouting DB with the CD forums?

What would be the purpose in this?

I really appreciate the whole openness of this project though, it'll allow for easier interoperability. This is just more difficult when things are 'owned' by one team, or one person.

[Josh Hambright]

If brandon wanted to use the system to put something on CD there is no reason why he should or couldn't. Since we are making this open to all then it would make sense that he as well as anyone could integrate it into his website.

[rbayer]

If you want to let people integrate it into websites, all you need is a little php magic to generate an XML file based on different requests. Kinda like how you can have the latest CD threads show up on your own website.

The other possibility would be to allow direct access to the SQL (I assume you're planning on using something like MySQL) database to selected users/websites.

[AJ Quick]

Full access to the mySQL server would present very serious security threats. There could be, however, easy ways to connect through php pages where the code is phrased through url variables.

[Brandon Martus]

Originally posted by AJ Quick
Full access to the mySQL server would present very serious security threats. There could be, however, easy ways to connect through php pages where the code is phrased through url variables.

Full access would be very dangerous, but a highly restricted read-only account wouldn't be too bad though. I know most hosting companies don't allow this on their virtual hosting for security reasons, so you'd need a dedicated mysql server somewhere, where you could grant the read-only / highly locked down access grants.

XML-RPC is a nice method I recently learned about which would be a good candidate in addition to, or along side of, straight XML.

[Jack]

Yeah...

When i was talking about CD, i ment where would a good place to place link(s) to either the overall portal or directly to a team's page.

An XML standard will be used ... IE: You call a script passing some vars (Ex: Team #, Type of data...) and it will spit back to you the results in XML. I think this would allow for the best openness of the system.

If anyone has any ideas further on how to structure the network of data, please post it here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=20610

Jack

[GregT]

I would be willing to help you program it... not like I've got much better to do with my time.



Greg

[Josh Hambright]

Another area were we could probably greatly help the first community is if in addition to all the other software that will be distributed through the FIRST scouting network, if we also had a standalone version of some sort of scouting program.

So if rookie teams aren't yet ready to take that leap into the massive network we can still distribute a piece of software that is already set up and ready to roll for teams to scout with. Maybe even make it customizable for their needs, like by having a setup wizard type thing.

Just another idea that poped into my head.

[GregTheGreat]

Originally posted by oneangrydwarf
Another area were we could probably greatly help the first community is if in addition to all the other software that will be distributed through the FIRST scouting network, if we also had a standalone version of some sort of scouting program.

So if rookie teams aren't yet ready to take that leap into the massive network we can still distribute a piece of software that is already set up and ready to roll for teams to scout with. Maybe even make it customizable for their needs, like by having a setup wizard type thing.

Just another idea that poped into my head.

That sounds like a pretty good idea. It would probably be very helpful to a lot of Rookie teams. Good Thinking.

Good Luck to everyone at the invitationals.

[Dan Richardson]

I personally would just make things easy and manage it with some easy database creator like Filemaker.. and just use unlimited on someones server, where so that you could still have everything customizable and open to anyone who wished to access it

I know my team had planned on doing that with our BCS for next year and would be willing to help out with anything possible, in this area.

Any questions just pm me