FRC Blogged - Virtual Kit – Early Item Release

FIRST General Forum
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Posted on the FRC Blog, 11/17/13: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/Virtual-Kit-Early-Item-Release

Virtual Kit – Early Item Release

**Blog Date: **Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - 14:34

Here’s some more information from Kate and Collin, our Kit of Parts team:

One of the many fun things that happens at the *FIRST *Championship is the opportunity to talk directly with teams and get their input… on everything. Last year, we had the pleasure of being invited to a meeting with Team 1983 about a tool they discovered that helped them play effectively and competitively. They wanted to share this tool with the rest of the FRC community, so they worked with the company that makes the tool, introduced them to FIRST, and as a result, got that tool in the 2014 Kit of Parts.

Thanks to these efforts, all teams that have at least registered and signed up for at least one event (i.e. the team number you see in TIMS is no more than four digits) will get five copies of Tableau Desktop Professional in their 2014 Kit of Parts to help parse and view data. Tableau Desktop is based on technology from Stanford University that lets you drag & drop to analyze data. You can connect to data, then visualize and create interactive dashboards. It’s in the Virtual Kit and the license key will be posted in your team’s TIMS account by 5pm Eastern time… today! This will allow you to download and register the software, familiarize yourself it, watch some training videos developed specifically for FRC, and try it yourself… all before the season kicks off.

Thank you to Tableau and Team 1983!

Change of Date: December FRC Ask an Expert Call

Please note that the date for the December Ask an Expert Call has changed from Wednesday, December 4th to Wednesday, December 18th at 7-8 PM (ET). This call will be hosted on Google+ Hangouts on Air. The link to view will be posted on the FRC Facebook Page and Twitter 30 minutes prior to the start of the call (6:30 PM, ET).

This Ask an Expert Call will be hosted by Renee Becker, *FIRST *VISTA. This will be an introduction to the *FIRST *Fundraising Tool. The agenda will be posted here: http://www.usfirst.org/community/volunteers/fsm_training_calls

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This looks very, very cool. I’m hoping that we can get this working well in time for regional scouting. If so, it could really revolutionize the way we scout and gather data.

Anyone from 1983 care to add in how they used Tableau to scout and analyze data? Navid? I’m interested to hear exactly how you implemented it.

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Looks like a good statistics program.

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Another example of why Team 1983 is one the best all around teams in FIRST, especially the North Western part of the United States.

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Hello! I am the student from 1983 who got in contact with Tableau. Also, I am the one who wrote and recorded all of the FIRST tutorials on the Tableau landing page.

Our team used Tableau last year to simplify the process of analyzing our scouting data. We used to use Excel and pivot tables to move our data from entry, to a graph. The whole process was incredibly complicated. Before we switched to Tableau last year, I probably sunk in 3 weeks (~25 hours) into the buggy system. We decided to scrap Excel because it was obviously not designed for entry and switch to Access and to use Tableau for visualization. The new system took only an hours to build and had fewer bugs. Also, Tableau allowed us to make new visualizations, or change the ones we had already built on the fly.

The tutorial videos on the landing page (http://www.tableausoftware.com/first-robotics#section-three) are pretty much exactly the same as our system last year.

Also, feel free to PM me about any questions you our your team might have. I would love to help.

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You did a great job on the tutorial videos! I was watching them to get an overview of the system, and it looks like Tableau is going to be a very useful tool for FRC. Thank you to Team 1983 for all of the hard work you have put into this!

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I’m really proud of Quinn and the scouting team. Data acquisition and analysis is something we’ve always considered highly important on our team. We post our data at competitions to share with other teams and it’s critical for us to be able to effectively and accurately communicate said data.

If anyone is interested, our new scouting landing page where we post competition data is at:
http://www.thebestalliance.com.

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Wow… Quinn, Thanks for the information. Fantastic job.

My scouts are going to be busy early this year.

David

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Can’t wait to use this, assuming we can get kids to scout this year… (Limited KidPower)

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Thank you to everyone who is sending me feedback! I am planning to make more written tutorials about commonly asked questions or problems that keep on turning up.

Please don’t hesitate to post or PM me about any questions or comments that you or anyone on your team has about the program or the training.

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This program looks like a great way to quickly look at data with its primarily visual presentation. I know in the tutorials it shows how to import the data through access. Currently we are using excel to dump all of our raw data into.

-Do you recommend going with access? I have never really used it before but looks like a definite improvement in ease of use compared to excel
-Have you had experience with importing from excel? and/or why did you choose access over excel?

Really want to have our team implementing this program this year but having a difficult time understanding the importing part of the process.

Thanks for your help and push to make this available to all FIRST teams!

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Hey Alex,

The main reason we use Access now is that it is really easy to enter data into. I don’t know if the video really showed it off, but entering data into Access is really simple and it is hard for people to put something in the wrong spot or to override old data. However, if your team likes entering data like it is usually entered in excel, Access can do that too. The main improvement that Access has over Excel is easy of use.

However, if you want to continue using Excel for data storage, that works too. I have used Excel with Tableau a lot, and it is very easy. The one thing you have to do is make sure that your data is raw, not pivoted. For example, raw data looks like:

team, match, a, b, c,
1234, 1, 3, 43, 4,
1563, 1, 4, 2, 5,
2432, 5, 2, 4, 6,

while pivoted data looks like:

Team 1234
Match: 1
a: 3
b: 43
c: 4

Team 1563
Match 1
a 4
b 2
c 5

and so on

As long as any source is organized in the raw data way, then Tableau can import it really easily. All databases (like MySQL) are automatically organized this way, and so are most CSVs. The easiest way to check for this is to make sure that there are no “header rows” besides the name of the columns.

Tableau also has a few good resources for this:
-Tableau’s tutorial for importing data: http://www.tableausoftware.com/learn/tutorials/on-demand/connecting-excel-csv-and-text-files
-Tableau’s data reshaping tool http://kb.tableausoftware.com/articles/knowledgebase/addin-reshaping-data-excel

Hope this helps, and if you have any more questions, don’t hesitate to ask,
Quinn

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Awesome, thanks for the response and the links for tutorials. Slowly figuring this out, but it is looking like an efficient system to use.

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I use Tableau at work, using it to visualize energy use patterns in 15 minute increments across 18 months of data. It is quite versatile and useful to learn for future projects, not just scouting.

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Agreed. I am planning on trying to analyze our team’s budget to look for waste. That is, if they let me. Specifically with a tree graph, I feel like analyzing a budget with Tableau will help us (or any other team who tries it) save money.

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I’ve spent the last few hours messing around with Tableau, and I love it. Great tutorials. My question (that I believe wasn’t answered in the video) is what is the best way to utilize the program when you have little data? For example, is it “worth it” to generate all the algorithms and graphs with blank data(with all the fields set up in access/excel), then replace the dataset with completed data? Or is the primary intention to generate the graphs and all the calculated fields ‘on the fly’?

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I can’t speak for Tableau specifically but I can speak general data viz - Generally you want to work with a sample of your data. This can be data generated to look close enough or it can be a subset of actual data. There are ‘best practices’ for designing visuals but in some cases breaking those rules can result in better visuals. Really you need to know your data and how to represent it.

I’d suggest generating a sample data set based on what you expect distributions to look like. Just so you have an idea what your stuff will look like.

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Andrew is right. The fake data was mostly provided for practice. Also, I will release another more relevant data set once the game is released.

Creating all of the charts with fake data is a good way to test your thoughts and to build the things you think you will want to use at an event. For inexperienced scouts, it ensures that your team will have at least a few of the graphs you may need once the real data comes in. I don’t think the videos really highlight how fast we can make these graphs, but if I was to make one of these without explaining my actions it would take about 10 minutes to make everything shown in the whole series including the calculated fields.

TLDR; Use the sample database to blueprint the graphs you will want to make for the event. However, it is perfectly doable to generate all graphs and calculations at the event for an experienced user.