History
During the 2009 build season, one of our programmers, while looking through chief Delphi for a better way to scout, stumbled across a thread posted by a Team 1726 member about scouting on the Nintendo DualScreen (DS). We decided to explore this system, and six weeks later, we have a working system digital scouting system. We tested it during SVR, and it worked as expected. We’re now posting the files here for all to use.
Technical Details
The program was written in C using the DevkitPro development environment and the PAlib Nintendo DS library functions.
There are three required hardware parts (aside from the DS):
SD Card: Any card above 2mb will work… but the smallest card available in stores (at this moment) is 2gb. This is where the program and all of its files, including pictures of the robots, are saved.
Super Card: This converter device takes a SD card and turns it into a GBA card, They’re available from “http://realhotstuff.com”
Super Key: This is the device which bypasses the security on the DS, allowing non-Nintendo approved cards to be run. This is also available from http:;//realhotstuff.com.
DevkitPro (and associated instructions for installation) are available from http://www.devkitpro.org/ and http://palib.info/wiki/.
Setting Up
Required Parts:
- SD Card (6) –formatted Fat16
- Super Card (6)
- Super Key (6)
- DS (6)
- Memory Card Reader (1)
- Computer (1)
Obtain the match list for your regional from FIRST, and format it as a CSV with the first element as the match number, followed by the six robot numbers also separated by commas. Save this file as DS.txt. Next create a blank text file called output.txt.
Next gather images of every robot attending the regional either by checking The Blue Alliance, or Chief Delphi or by taking pictures on the Thursday of competition (as we did). Convert all images to GIF’s, with a maximum height of 180px and place them in a directory called images.
Make sure that all the SD Cards are set to FAT16 (reformat them if not). Then, place the DS.txt, output.txt, and Team100Scouting.sc.nds, and the entire image directory files onto each DS card.
Place the SD card into the Super Card. Then insert the Super Card and Super Key into the DS. Turn on the DS and toggle to the Team100Scouting.sc.nds file and run by pushing the A button.
Using The System
There are four tabs on the main display: initialize, autonomous, teleoperated, and final assessment. Touching the ball numbers increments the count while touching the minus number decreases the count. We included a checkbox for robots that are no shows or disabled during the match. The system automatically loads the match list from the CSV file, to automatically assign each DS a team to scout. If needed, uncheck the Load From File checkbox to manually enter the team number.
When moving to the Autonomous tab, the robot picture will now display on the top screen. After the match is over, and the robot has been ranked, pushing the “finished” button in the lower right corner of the END screen will save the data to the output.txt file and the match number will automatically increase. If the DS is powered off, just scroll back to the match number needed.
Importing To Excel
Once the scouting is done, the data can be analyzed in Excel. First, open all six CSV files, and append them to each other. Sort the raw data by team number and then paste the data into the scouting Excel file we’ve included, which contains formulas to make averages and isplay results. So we present to you the DS scouting code for this year of competition, to be used in scouting. Let us know how it works for you!
This is the exact setup we used in the Silicon Valley Regional.
