I am trying to put together a suite of useful scouting tools to handle a lot of the time consuming “extra” stuff. Not data collection, but all the other little things. These tools would be hosted on Pairwise
I already have a scout schedule maker put together, and have a few other things in the works/plans including:
“minimum teams to prescout for worlds” which will take a prelim schedule and your team number then return the a minimum assortment of stuff for you to look at for your partners/opponents. I think @XaulZan11 may have been talking about this earlier at some point on CD, but I cannot find the thread.
District championship division validity checker - if ya know ya know.
Any other stand-alone non data collection/analysis tools that you may find useful? Let me know!
A way to search for an event and get both the First API ID and The Blue Alliance ID. Those two are usually, but not always, similar. I’d like to be able to search by either ID, or by a portion of the event name. Bonus if it also support FTC and The Orange Alliance.
A tool that accepts data from several different scouting systems in the preferred export format from each system and can convert the data into the output formats of every other scouting system.
I don’t know if this would even be mathematically possible, but I’ve always liked the idea of a “what-if” tool for matches. I know Statbotics has a general match prediction system but this is more about RPs and ranking. Given a tough match, is it better to focus on getting 1 RP even if we probably won’t win, or is it better for us to play defense and try to prevent the opponents from getting their 3rd or 4th RPs? How would either strategy affect both our alliance’s and our opponent alliance’s rankings?
Edit with a second idea:
A calculator where you can plug in a team’s performance for Regional Pool Points. This would also let you try different combinations and see how they affect your performance. If it could also determine/show what the likely cutoff score is for the next draw, that would be nice.
This is similar (and probably equally helpful) as what we were talking about previously. What I’ve found really helpful for me as someone who focuses more on subjective stuff for upcoming qualification match strategy, is a tool that tells me which teams to watch each match. So, it looks at the 6 teams in each match and returns the teams that we play with/against in future matches, sorted by how soon we see them. Google drive is blocked at work but I can DM you what I currently use if you want an example.
For the Scout Schedule Maker, I know some teams (mine included) schedule based on time opposed to match number. So, that could be something to add.
Depending how I implement this I may make an API call available (and/or post the code… It’s a pretty simple concept)
Yeah, I made a conscious choice for match number only. I may reconsider/add a variation. But thanks for saying something because I have no idea how common time vs match # is. Not something we regularly talk about on here.
What do you mean by performance? Qualification ranking and playoff outcome? I’ve been working on estimating the correlation between OPR or OPR rank at an event and Regional Points. I also expect that Regional Pool cutoffs will remain roughly equal from year to year.
Yes to both. In general, I’d like a single web calculator where I can put in rank, regional size, and everything else that goes into regional pool calculations to get the points for that result. Then students could see “if we go up one more in rank we’ll get one more qual point” or “if we win this playoff match, or get any one award we have a really good chance of meeting the cutoff”.
This isn’t a whole app/tool, but a specific feature request for you and anyone else making scouting tools.
I’m working on developing a new scouting application for our team (and possibly a scouting alliance) with all the features that we’ve always wanted.
The one that is very minor, but has already been so dang helpful in testing is that I added a button that just toggles team numbers to team names in the interface. For someone that doesn’t have every team number memorized, and frequently plays at events with teams with really similar numbers (3647, 3476, etc…) it’s nice to have. It also trims out any “the” or “robotics” that makes the names unnecessarily longer. Also, the gif is too compressed to see it well, but hovering over a team number shows a tooltip of the name, and vice versa.
It would be really slick if other apps had this same feature built in, otherwise I’ll have to try to figure out how to make a firefox extension that does it at the browser level.
A third aspect is I sometimes refer to a team by their city, which can be helpful at events like FIM District LSSU Event (2024) - The Blue Alliance which had two teams named “Gladiators”. Maybe not the most useful for cities with several teams, but maybe something to add in the tooltip?
(funny aside, that event also has a team from Rock, but TheROK is from Kingsford)
Yeah, At least back ND/MN direction, where my knowledge is pretty complete, I definitely do this too. Did it in SW Michigan as well. Something to think about.
Similar numbers in different regions still throw me for a loop, especially when it really could be either one because they are high performers… 5172 (Greenbush Gators) and 5712 (Hemlock) get me a lot.
The 25xx crowd in MN wll be a perennial source of confusion for me as well.
It could be fun to have a little tool that would allow folks in the stands to make a prediction on match outcome (could be as broad as match point spread or as specific as quantity of game pieces scored by an individual robot, depends how fancy you care to get with it) and then take scouted data from that match and compare to the prediction. The closer you get to actual the more points you receive. This wouldn’t work for everyone but it could be a way to get some folks more excited and invested in scouting
The general consensus is that each match is about 8 minutes, depending on the game and reset time etc. And the planned match time is noted on the published schedule.
I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to set up the scout scheduler such that if a shift of time X is ending when a match is predicted to run or scheduled, push it to the next set of scouts, would it?
in addition to the features already mentioned, it would be nice to see what teams at a regional are prequalified (previous wins/pulls from regional pool, etc) and to see the amount of points other teams at a regional have earned (maybe in a ranking format?)
Fun fact: We ended up on an alliance at Worlds a few years back because the captain mistook us for 5172 (they were ranked a lot higher anyways and already on an alliance, but still kinda funny).
Any other fun scouting tool ideas you all have floating around?
I have my hands full atm, but once the game drops I am not really going to be developing Pairwise over the official season. Small stand-alone tools however… Totally on the cards.
