Team 8 is proud to present: The Team 8 Scouting Package

[Guy Davidson]

Upon the eve of week 5 regionals (and unfortunately not earlier), we are proud to be able to finally release our scouting package.

Before we move onto the meat and potatoes of the post, some "thank-you's" are in order:
To tjcasser (message board user name) of Team 768, thank you for initially sharing the code with us. It has served us quite well, including the modifications we've made in order to allow for Overdrive data entry and analysis, and this would have been impossible with your code.
To my fellow programmers, Patrick Horn (who wrote a few of the modifications we used for last year's competition), and Erik Krasner, who helped me debug and write the Overdrive version. Thanks a lot for everything.

The attached zip archive includes three files. Most important is the "Team 8 Scouter.jar" file, which is the scouter itself. Also archived are our pit and match scouting sheets. The pit sheet is designed to be filled in on Thursday, and the match sheet is designed for one scouter per match, for all six teams. If that proves to be too many, you could print more copies, or simply cut the sheet in half (or more), and use more people.

The scouter itself has three main windows. The first you should deal with, although the least in importance, is the Regional tab. You must add a regional before using any of the other functions! Otherwise it might break itself. After that, you can add teams. We typically enter teams Thursday night, after all the data and pictures have been collected. Entering the data is fairly intuitive, and you can also add pictures via the File->Add Image # menu. Alternatively, you can manually add pictures, by placing them in the folder where everything is saved (more on that in a minute), in the teams subfolder, by naming them "Team#-1.jpg" or "Team#-2.jpg". So for example, pictures of the Chief Delphi robot should be named "47-1.jpg" and "47-2.jpg".

After adding teams, you can add matches. Once again, we hope data entry is fairly intuitive in the Add->Match window. You should maximize the window, as that gets the text fields to a usable size. After you fill in teams in the boxes in the top section, you will notice the numbers in the left-most columns in the data-entry section change to reflect the team numbers you're working on.

All data is saved in the C:\frc2007\ folder. I don't know what it would do in a mac or a linux, although there is a way to use this with them too (via the csv import/export functions). Data is not saved automatically! Please remember to save. As mentioned, you can also import and export the data to and from csv files. Not only this eases transferring the data between computers, but it also makes it really easy to share data. The Teams export includes most of the empirically calculated statistics, to allow for ease of sharing and review even if you don't have the program with you.

As for the empirical statistics. Once match data starts piling in, you will notice the program calculates most statistics for you. Note: we are aware that it does not compute the ranking score correctly. (I haven't gotten around to fixing that piece of code yet ) The averages are all simply the average number of times the team does that specific action per match. The score average calculates, from the individual averages, how many points a team usually scores per match. The offensive and defensive indices measure that team's average contribution on either the offensive or defensive ends. The offensive one looks at the average of the the scores that the team put with its alliance each match, subtracting 1/3rd of the average score of each of the other two alliance members (to account for their contribution). The defensive one looks at how many points an opposing alliance scored against this team compared to how much that alliance would score on average (the average of the average scores of each team).

While we tried, this probably doesn't cover everything. If you try to use it, and run into questions, please post here and let us know! Or if you're in Las Vegas, you can find me and ask, and hopefully I'll be able to help. Please let us know if you use it, and how well it worked for you.