The 4855 Scouting Program is a web app I designed for my team to use to easily scout at competitions without requiring internet access. I’ve been working on the tool since October of 2019, but since it’s acquired so many features since its conception, I thought I would share it with other teams in the robotics community to use as well!
Runs on any device: A lot of the students at my high school are given school-owned chromebooks to use throughout the year. I wanted to ensure that anyone on the team wouldn’t have any problem using the scouter, so I designed it as a website that downloads onto your hard drive and is displayed off it and in a web browser. This means that anyone, no matter the device (except maybe iPhones, sorry guys) can run the program.
No internet required: Even though the program runs off the browser, it’s downloaded onto a computer and therefore does not require Wi-Fi to operate. You will need to find an offline way such as through an arsenal of USB sticks to send complete scouting forms to your lead scouter, though.
Powerful analytical tools: Scouts watch a single robot during each match and send their complete match forms to the lead scout. Once all the data is in the lead scout’s hands, they’re able to rank every team by their offensive power, simulate matches and breakdown every piece of the score to aid the drive team in drafting a strategy, and generate playoff picklists with the ability to prioritize certain attributes and rank every team at an event by it.
All of the code lives on our GitHub page as well as each release of the program, so whenever you want to start, download it from there. It’s written in HTML/CSS and JavaScript.
If you have any feedback or recommendations, let me know. If you like the scouter and your team plans on using it, let me know that as well!
Have you considered adding further depth to the scouting options? For example balls picked up and shot accuracy? Or some stuff like starting position? I get reasons for keeping it simple, just curious if it was being considered.
A. a team’s shot accuracy will be reflected in the total number of balls that they score. If they are missing relatively frequently, they won’t be posting higher numbers in their stats. At the same time, if shot inaccuracy is frequent and egregious for a team, scouts can use the comments section to reflect that. You also mentioned simplicity, which is probably the main reason why we don’t track this.
B. We don’t track starting position because that data will rarely affect us if we’re playing against teams, and teams we are allied with we can just ask where they’d like to start the match. When writing the questions for verbal forms we wanted to focus on questions that would affect a match that we wouldn’t be able to find out if we’re playing against a team. I do see a little value in having starting configuration data to speculate long before matches begin which autonomous routines your team will be able to run, but ultimately at the end of the day it’s something you can ask during a pre-match team huddle.
I can see the desire for missed shots, especially in auto. A team that misses 3 shots every match is not equal to a team that never shot. But as long as scouts make notes post match in the comments, and lead scouter actually reads them, it makes sense to keep it as short as possible. I think this scouting form encapsulates the fundamentals.
My question: is it possible to incorporate a button for increasing the power cells made, like [+] and [-] buttons? Might be more convenient to just keep clicking every time a PC goes in rather than selecting a cell, backspacing, and typing a new number.
The HTML input type I used supposedly has a pair of up/down buttons built into it but I don’t think all browsers support it. I’ll try and write a JavaScript equivalent of this function to make sure anyone can do that because I do agree that deleting and retyping the number for each field is heavily error-prone.
Just uploaded the latest version of the program. Namely, scouts can now edit forms, and the up/down buttons have been added to the scouting form for the browsers that didn’t support them in the prior version.
Next, I’m hoping to add a couple more form controls (among them, a checkbox under teleop if a team was making frequent hits to the inner port when shooting high) and some interfaces in the match simulator/picklist to display general and defensive comments.