Amazon Web Services use cases

FIRST General Forum
#12

We’ve already been using Airtable for scouting, which is more or less Google Forms/Sheets with a bit nicer UI. The Slackbot pretty much just had one command: @scoutingbot match x. It would grab the alliances for that match from TBA, grab data for the 6 teams out of Airtable, and try to calculate an estimated score for each alliance, along with some basic average stats for each team.

An example output:

------RED: 74.7063492063492---------
Team: 2957
    Hatches: 0.75
    Cargo: 3.25
    Climb: 2.25
Team: 2702
    Hatches: 2
    Cargo: 2.25
    Climb: 5.25
Team: 1885
    Hatches: 4.25
    Cargo: 4
    Climb: 5.25
------BLUE: 67.5---------
Team: 7797
    Hatches: 0
    Cargo: 0
    Climb: 2.25
Team: 4130
    Hatches: 2.25
    Cargo: 3.75
    Climb: 6.75
Team: 4039
    Hatches: 3.75
    Cargo: 2.5
    Climb: 12

Code can be found here: https://github.com/iliterobotics/FRC-Scouting-2019. It’s definitely not pretty; this was a last minute idea that was thrown together in a few days, but it was super useful as a concept and something we hope to expand on for this upcoming season.

3 Likes
#13

GitHub Pages works well for this.

4 Likes
#14

In my opinion, AWS Educate is not very useful. I got it on my own (not through FRC), and it turned out that all the work for the application really wasn’t worth it (it is good that being through the KOP expedites the application). Some things that limited its use for me:

  • You cannot use any powerful instances (you’re limited to something around t2.nano). This was a dealbreaker for me because I wanted to train a ML model.
  • If you do not use your $75 after a year then it’s gone.
  • (Not really a functionality thing) They spam you a lot once you sign up about AWS things that you probably don’t care about.

If you want are more flexible cloud credit for students I would go with the Azure one through the GitHub student pack; it doesn’t have most of these issues.

2 Likes
#15

This is a cool sponsorship that has a lot of potential uses for teams. The $75/student is a little awkward but you can realistically get a ton out from just the free tier even without this credit. Free tier also lets you use IAM as the more typical permission management system so multiple people can interface with the same resources (I haven’t used educate enough to know how its done there).

I suggest people check out what you can do even without this discount: https://aws.amazon.com/free

All of the below are per month, so I expect many teams would have little problem staying in the limits.

750 hours of EC2 t2.micro: This allows you to run a virtual server 24/7 and is probably powerful enough for many use cases. I recommend checking out AWS Elastic Beanstalk which makes deploying a web server relativly easy and doesn’t require any charge with the free EC2 instance. You can use Python, Node.js, Java, Go, and many other languages.

5GB of S3: Simple storage for scouting photos or any other files.

750 hours of Amazon Relational Database: Run an EC2 instance hosting one of many availably flavors of SQL database 24/7.

25GB of DynamoDB (NoSQL): Another database option if you prefer NoSQL.

1 million Lambda Requests: Lambda is a serverless compute platform which is super easy to set up in the web console. This is cool because you can make API endpoints without needing an EC2 instance running because Lambda only runs code on demand. You can develop in basically any major language you want and trigger it with either an API endpoint or other AWS services.

I would say this is a perfect use for Lambda. You don’t need to have a server running constantly so you can use your free EC2 instance for something else. I’ve set up a slack bot before using Lambda and API Gateway. Mind you this one was pretty useless as it was designed to send memes, but you could easily make it useful by querying TBA or scouting data. You can read more about Lambda here.

(Disclosure, I’ve previously interned at Amazon Robotics and take advantage of a lot of these free tier services for a school project)

5 Likes
#16

Right up until you try to use the credits and realize that you need AWS training to make sense of the hundred different products some of which actually compete with each other.

  • Someone who is overwhelmed by AWS options sometimes
3 Likes
#17

My favorite crazy one is AWS Ground Station, for all your satellite control needs. I also echo the overwhelming amount of options, FRC teams should probably simply stick to the core group of services listed on the website as ‘Featured Services’.

3 Likes
#18

The scouting team would also supplement the raw data with notes when needed. For a first iteration, it was excellent. This is definitely a great way to push info from one place to another; sometimes the drive team would be off dealing with something, and someone on the scouting team would activate the bot for us.

We had a specific channel for scouting bot, so the whole team wasn’t spammed with specifics.

2 Likes
#19

Last year we used AWS for our scouting application. The benefit was that we didn’t have to worry about syncing devices. Our scouting app was a web app and the server stored the data, we could just bring it down to tableau with a couple of different restful enpoints and then analyze it however we wanted. The biggest benefit was collection.

3 Likes
#20

no reserved instance support in aws educate accounts unfortunately.

1 Like
#21

We’ve been hesitant to switch to any online-based scouting system because we don’t reliably have WiFi access at competitions. Are you guys using USB tethered hotspots or something?

1 Like
#22

Here’s a source from the AWS blog.

2 Likes
#23

What was the benefit of this over using Google Forms/Sheets and then sending it to Tableau?

#24

We relied on the kids having phones with data.
Though sometimes data was not good in a venue, we had written the scouting web app in such a way that you could load it up where you had a connection, collect data where you don’t and sync the data where you do.

#25

What worries me is I don’t like changing competition procedures between events as much as is possible. In this case, for example, if we don’t have a runner for one competition because we’re using a Slack bot, and suddenly we need one for the second competition (which we’ll only realize once we’re there), then we have to add a scouting role while at a competition which is logistically difficult.

I don’t think there’s a great solution to this except to sign up only for competitions where we are guaranteed to have data coverage, but it’s something to think about if you’re considering switching to online scouting.

#26

Phones over a cellular network.

#27

We collected cycle time data as well as number of each type of cycle, in the end it ended up not being as important, plus it had a nice look to it.

#28

Just thought I would point out for any teams that are/are part of 501(c)(3) nonprofits–you can buy $2,000 in AWS Credits for a $175 fee through TechSoup. That’s probably more than most teams would want, but it would be good if you wanted to do some serious hosting on the platform.

2 Likes
#29

Has anyone figured out how to use the AWS credit to run some massive scenario-based computations to optimize your FIRST Choice priority list?

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#30

Yes, and the most favorable outcome was getting 116 gold shaft collars.

But more seriously, I re-ran it adding AWS credits as an option, and then it thought I should buy 575 credits worth of AWS services and one NI LabVIEW USB drive. So I believe it to be unstable.

#31

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