Hello everyone! I am proud to announce the release of my modular scouting application, Simple Alliance Scouting Framework (Simple ASF). This program aims to enable anyone, even those with minimal programming experience, to create a fully functional scouting front end within one hour. The app uses a modular JSON format, where you can collect as much or as little data as you’d like, and send it all to a centralized backend. The form works on mobile and can be turned into a locally-hosted webserver that exports data via a CSV for scouters that may not have an internet or data connection. Feel free to use this however you like, and to make pull requests so I can improve this software for more users! Happy kickoff!
Hey Simple ASF team! In an effort to increase interoperability between scouting apps, we recently announced The Purple Standard (TPS), a unified, community-driven standard for FRC scouting data (see https://chiefdelphi.com/t/the-purple-standard-a-unified-and-community-driven-standard-for-frc-scouting-data/449394 and https://thepurplestandard.com), paving the way for collaborative scouting across apps (which benefits smaller teams and rookies). TPS is modular and completely customizable based on the data you want to collect in your scouting app. Would you be interested in integrating TPS into your app to benefit teams using Simple ASF and join the wider network of collaborative scouting data?
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Hello Kabir! I took a look at TPS, and while it looks like an amazing project, integrating it with Simple ASF would go against what the project stands for in the first place. Locking down the way data is submitted removes the freedom that comes with the modular format that simple ASF is based on. Additionally, the program would need to be updated once every season to reflect the new scouting data metrics, which also goes against another one of the core principles: relevancy for every season with virtually zero modification to how the program works. If you or one of your team members can figure out a way to fix these issues, I would be glad to integrate TPS into Simple ASF, as both projects seem to have the common goal of making scouting more accessible for FRC teams, no matter their experience or resources.
Thank you for your feedback! The goal of TPS is to collect definitions of different types of scouting data in one place so that data can be parsed using a consistent format in an interoperable way. If a definition of a data property does not yet exist in TPS, it’s easy to open a PR to define a new one. Also the data properties can carry over to future years, so for example one data property in TPS relates to ground pickup ability which is not specific to a certain year. Perhaps as part of Simple ASF’s modular framework there can be a parameter in the JSON format for a TPS property name which is used to generate a TPS-formatted data export (or submit the TPS data to our API which can be used by teams to store and retrieve their scouting data), would that be something that could potentially work well?
That’s a good idea! The metadata portion would be somewhat difficult to properly collect and format, but it could be done with a centralized widget that is displayed at the top of the page with all of the metadata metrics, or something similar along the side. I don’t have a lot of free time right now, but I can work on integration bit by bit and will hopefully be able to get it done within a few weeks.
No worries! If I may ask, what parts of the metadata are most difficult to collect?
Its not the collection of the dats that is difficult, but the issue of essentially forcing the developer to add a set of widgets, but the data applies across all seasons, so it doesn’t really go against any of Simple ASF’s policies.
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I see, perhaps in the layout file there can be an additional field called “tps-property” with values like “abilities.auto-leave-starting-zone” and then when the data is submitted it also formats and sends to the TPS API, and could maybe a button next to the export match data button could be for exporting TPS-formatted match data.
The method I’ve ended up going with is having a proprty in the config called “useTPS”. If this is true (which it will be by default), all widgets are checked for an additional property called “TPSDatatype”, which is used to sort the data into the proper TPS format. That way the data format can be changed/updated as the need arises with minimal effort on the developer’s end. Additionally, there is a button to export the saved match data as a JSON, which is formatted according to TPS standard. This method preserves the modularity and flexibility of Simple ASF, while still using TPS.
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That sounds like a solid implementation! Please let me know when this is live in your app and we can highlight it as a supported app in the TPS repo!
Will do
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Hello again TPS team! TPS has been successfully integrated into Simple ASF. To give a quick rundown:
- Users can optionally enable TPS for their app in config (to ensure that teams can organize data how they want to)
- Data categories can be specified in
layout.json - The CSS looks just a smidge better
Let me know if there is anything else that needs editing, or feel free to make a PR on the GitHub.
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