Introducing the Falcon Scouting System. This is a scouting system that we developed on C# with the help of EHaskins that will be used for the next FRC season with the new game being updated to it of course. We made this system after Dr. Karen Suhn helped us develop our first scouting system years ago. With this system, one scouter will take a game pad and scout one team from one alliance (hence the different colored game pads for red and blue alliance).
Various button combinations make certain counters go up or down in value and are shown using labels. An example of this would be a combination of the right trigger and triangle being pressed at the same time will make the counter for top basket attempted go up showing that the team attempted a top basket.
After the match is over, you press the Save Data button and all the data will be saved to a notepad file and all the numbers will be comma separated. Then, they can be transferred to an excel file. All the counters will also reset meaning that it will be ready for the next match.
We still need to fix some minor issues but the code will be released as soon as we are finished.
How do you sort through this information? Do you have some sort of weighted algorithm, or do you just export to Excel, combine and average the data for each team, and then sort?
The more I think about this, the more interested I get. This seems to be a fairly efficient way to get to a relatively low-cost, low-equipment electronic scouting system.
I have a lot of questions, and I hope that you’re inclined to explain more: How does each controller’s user know which team they’re supposed to be scouting? How do you know which controller is which? How do the scouts know what buttons do what?
It looks really cool! My only concern is that all the scouters might need to be able to see the screen, I know I would always be nervous that I accidentally hit a button or flicked a stick too many times and I’d need to be checking my numbers constantly. If the scouters sit in 2 rows it probably wouldn’t be a problem I guess.
To answer the first question, the scouter that is on the far left red game pad will always scout red 1 robot and will look at the far left red panel to score. Then the same for the middle red game pad where they always scout red 2 robot and look at the middle red panel to score and so on. The blue ones are the same where the far left game pad scouts blue 1 and uses the first blue panel.
To know which controller is which, the person scouting the red 1 robots will use the red game pad that is connected to the first port on the USB hub that only the red game pads are connected to then so on for the other scouters.
We will teach the scouters what buttons do what and make them practice scouting with it using videos of matches so they can get more comfortable with the buttons and memorize them.
We are not entirely done with the scouting system yet. We still need to implement a place for autonomous mode. Once we finish it, we will be sure to share it.
Interesting idea. As usual, I have a few thoughts of how I’d do it differently…
It would probably be easier on your scouters if there was some sort of stream view/notification view that showed what they just changed. The easiest way to do this is flash numbers when manipulated, but you may already be doing that (I can’t tell from a still).
This is fantastic, even if you don’t end up sharing the coding with other teams, would you have the information readily available for others at the events you attend? Also have you guys been able to update it for this years game so far?
