Those of you who know me know that I have a good number of projects I publish on here for the community to use. Some of these are static projects that take some time to put together and then can be used repeatedly basically forever. The harder ones for me are the projects that require constant improvements and recalculations. Those projects take a lot more effort to keep up with, and as much as I want to constantly update statistics, believe it or not I actually do have a life outside of FRC that sometimes requires my time.
As a partial solution to this, I’ve set up a website that automatically recalculates statistics periodically so I don’t have to do it manually. It’s also where I will be posting any projects that I plan on continually updating, so I don’t need to keep updating links. The website is a GitHub Pages site, which pulls data from a server set up on a raspberry pi (which is what does the calculations). The rpi can be prone to crash if overloaded, so in case of server failure the webpage should pull from cached data from the GitHub which I update manually and will try to keep updated. I am decidedly not a web developer (or even an ECE major), so any suggestions for making the system more efficient without spending any money is welcome. The site does take a while to load, so please be patient; it has to load data from a lot of teams and all it’s all going through my home network.
Currently the website features my AMB Design Calculator, a District Points ranking (updates every night), a list of Hexafecta teams (updates once a week), and a W/L/T list for all teams (updates every night). I plan on adding more stuff there as I have time and as I develop it.
Is there any way you can do design PDFs as in drawings of your models or do solidworks drawings possibly so that it can be seen by everyone as a PDF? Sorry to ask
This is really cool information, thank you for posting this. I’ve often wished that the blue alliance had a place that listed all teams and their win/loss performance and award information in one place, and this does it exactly. One feature that might be neat to add in the future is to add a sort column on the District points, Hexafecta, and W/L/T pages for region, so you could just look at the teams in your district. Great job though, I will be referencing this often.
As in make the webpages into pdfs? I mean you can always print the page to a PDF saver. Or you can take a screenshot, paste into a word document, then save that document as a PDF. If you mean do it automatically, then no not really. I’m fairly sure Github Pages doesn’t support that, and even if they did it sounds like a complicated process for minimal gain.
If I’m misunderstanding your question, can you try to clarify further?
PDFs of the results wouldn’t be auto-updating, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of the website. Unless I dynamically generated the PDFs, which sounds like a ton of work. If you really want a PDF of the tables for some reason you can follow this guide I found online to save the webpage as a PDF.
Thanks for putting this together! It would be nice if on the long tables, the header row was sticky/frozen. Here’s a tutorial with several methods to do that.
Additionally, regarding the PDF question, maybe you could consider something like this. Essentially, a “Generate PDF” button below the table. This would essentially generate PDFs dynamically without all of the extra coding. If it wasn’t 2:00 AM (8:49:00 AM), I’d look into this further and see the feasibility.
Thanks for the tips. Unfortunately, none of the floating header methods I found were compatible with the table sorting script I was using. Since the table sorting script was slowing down load times and the floating header is much more useful, I decided to automatically sort the tables correctly and have them be static. If you want to sort by another metric, you can copy the data into Excel and sort manually. The floating header script I chose was definitely the easiest I found, but it’s a bit buggy. If people find that the bugs are too hard to handle I may consider switching scripts.
I will look into some form of “Generate PDF” button like you described. If anything, that seems like the easiest way to do this. I’m also considering a “Download” button that lets you download the table(s) as a csv file, so I may choose to just use that and you can print the csv as a PDF in Excel if you so choose.
Providing an update, I spent some time over the past few days to update the website. The calculations are still the same, but the UI has been updated and the backend was completely rewritten. It’s looking like the automatic updating should actually work now, thanks to the backend being hosted on free servers from pythonanywhere.com. The table headers should stay at the top of the page as you scroll down, and you should be able to copy the data from the tables directly into an excel document if you want to use it for further processing.
The site address has changes slightly to arimb.github.io/Server (but the old address will still redirect there). Let me know if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions.