Hopefully discussion of all the various scouting efforts that take place can congregate here. Tough to do much now other than get lots of sleep because once Jan 5th arrives…
Certainly our team has appreciated your feedback on usefulness of our services. We’ll be integrating even more closely with the WASH setup and hopefully with GMCIA. I expect the whole Palm2PC2Web Process to be 100X smoother this year.
We will have a bit of our own SOAP data fields that we’ll once again ask all teams to fill-in themselves. A new twist this year might be for any team to report on any other team. We’ll see where that leads us. Pros and cons everywhere on that. Hopefully GP has meaning to those that will fill in the data.
I agree that scouting should be done, but it needs to be done from the bleachers and not going from pit to pit asking the team what their robot can do.
During 2001 I saw too many teams that said their robot could do this, this and this only to find out that the robot could barely get over the bridge or pick up a ball without falling over.
If someone from another team asks what your robot can do or not do…BE HONEST. They won’t think that your robot isn’t worth having on their alliance (at least I hope thay don’t).
On behalf of GMCIA, we are interested in working together on this. I think both of you touched on key points for scouting success:
Need for an accepted (and most important, COMMON) scouting template. This will enable many teams to scout using their own methods and tools but still share data. We need to publish the fields in the database earlier this year. This is hard to do, and is dependent on good definitions of all the data fields.
Need for actual data from matches. I call this “results-based” as opposed to “what the machine is supposed to do.” If the data is from actual matches, and enough matches are recorded, the true performance of a team can be understood.
We are intent on again using Visors or Palms for at-the-field data entry. It has proven to be the good solution for high volume scouting by multiple people. We will share our scouting template too, so anyone who wants can start taking data at competitions.
I’m glad to see this forum is alive, hopefully we’ll put it to good use this year.
I obviously agree with Wayne & Ken that scouting must be done during actual matches and not by interviewing teams in the pits. The major drawback of interviewing teams has nothing to do with honesty; even honest teams don’t know how to properly rate their robot. Before teams saw other teams in action I’m sure they thought they were potentially the top balancers last year, but when compared to the true standouts they were second tier. Teams have a tendency to over-state their abilities. What qualifies as good for an average team may not be good when compared to a national champion caliber team like Beatty. I’m pretty sure I posted a long message about this last year, so I’ll spare everyone
We should all agree on a format / template / standard for scouting data this year. That way, any team can create a program to gather or dispense data and have it be compatable with everyone else. WASH & SOAP did this last year, but we didn’t talk to GMCIA early enough to work with you guys. Hopefully these three scouting entities will have a truly unified scouting system this year.
I’m starting to sound like a broken record (or is it CD), but I agree that PalmOS handhelds are the best solution for high volume distributed scouting. That’s why WASH is using PalmOS handhelds again this year.
Ken & others, we’ll have to set up a conference call some time in the next couple of weeks to talk about plans for the upcoming season.
Mike, Raul, and I had several philosophical discussions on scouting last year, and I want to bring up one of the many subjects for this community to review.
I’d like to see if it’s acceptible to steer the Handheld Systems into the following approach:
Let “S” be a common set of data fields for all handheld scouting.
Let “W” be a unique set of data fields that the organizers of WASH want to track.
Let “G” be a unique set of data fields that the organizers of GMCIA want to track.
WASH tracks data S and W.
GMCIA tracks data S and G.
SOAP fully supports the importation and distribution of S, W, and G.
The ideas behind this approach are:
Try as we may, and good intentions though we have, it is tough to agree on Everything.
Data set S is large enough to capture the voted-on most likely to be “value added” data fields.
Data set S is small enough to allow for some individual components that allow each System to stand out in a unique way, but still help the entire FIRST Community. Also off-the-shelf database programs for PalmOS sometimes have a 30 field limit. Limiting S to, say 20, would allow for just enough variation, but maintain compatibility/re-usability across Systems.
These are the kinds of problems we should deal with now while we have nothing better to do with respect to scouting databases.
From our experience last year, we know how hard it is to get a group of teams to agree on a set of data to capture, so I like your idea. Last year, team 111 was interested the time it took for a robot to perform specific tasks (driving, grabbing goal, scoring, balancing, etc) and team 108 was more interested in scaled ratings, so we compromised and included both. With more teams it will be more difficult to include everyone’s wishes. So a core set of data that everyone includes, plus some WASH / GMCIA data they feel is important is an excellent idea.
What software did you guys use on your Palm OS handhelds last year? Team 122 (me!) used PenDragon Forms, with great success. Did a great job of throwing all of our data into one Access (Yes, I know. I don’t like Microsoft much either) database and was also really easy for people to get training on. Team members just had to follow on screen questions and instructions to get good, quality data. We also had Eye Module 2 cameras for each of our Visors which mean that we could take decent quality pics after collecting all the data. Let me tell you - a picture really is worth a thousand words. It can sum up a lot of ideas that take forever to explain through jestures.
Speaking of which (sorry, I know the post is running long…), is there some way that “we” could collect at least one picture of every robot before the first competition? Right before VCU last year, I hopped online and found as many pictures as I could of the teams that were going to be there. Being able to recognize them and then do follow-up research helped a bundle.
~Tom Fairchild~, who headed up scouting last year and discovered just how extreme it can get!
Let me tell you - a picture really is worth a thousand words. It can sum up a lot of ideas that take forever to explain through jestures.
Bingo. This is the why 108 has digitized the FIRST Video Feed for the past 3 years. Nothing beats seeing what happened, although sometimes the camera isn’t focused on a particular robot, or is not zoomed in enough. 108 can support IL and EPCOT (but only 3 of the 5 stages). We’re asking 267 to aid in KSC, and Tom from 177 is checking if they can support UTC. 111 can help with GLR and I need to call Andy B (45) about help in OHIO. So, potentially 5 regionals + National could be covered at present time.
108 is developing a guide to recording video at the events and would love to have some video from every regional. Hard drive space won’t be an issue for our website…at least that what our contract says. p.s. Hope you have a Macintosh with Video-In Please, serious inqueries only. Thanks.
is there some way that “we” could collect at least one picture of every robot before the first competition?
SOAP has no plans to capture photos, but I know WASH had it in their setup to print a picture of the team along with their scouting report. Can you provide more technical details on the camera attachments for the visors?
Also, since the onset of alliances, teams generally post pix of their robot by week 5. This Chief site has an image storage area, so I’d try to put out the word to centralize the photo gallery here…?
For WASH, we used HanDBase as our palm side app. It’s an excellent program for some uses, but not for robot scouting. It looks like a spreadsheet, and doesn’t have any forms capabilities. We considered PenDragon Forms before we started, it looked perfect, but the cost was way too high, and we wanted to distribute the app to other teams, which means we couldn’t use anything that required licenses. My team of students wrote a VB app for the PC to automagically transfer the data from HanDBase to Access and take care of conflicting data. With any luck and some hard work, we’ll dump HanDBase and use an Palm app that our team develops (custom forms!).
As for pictures, a couple of students ran around on competition Thursday and snapped pictures with a digital camera. At the regionals I believe we had the pictures in our database by Thursday evening, but computing resources was a problem at nats and we didn’t get them in at all. What we really need this year is a few students to take some pictures and rename the files (to the team number with leading 0’s) using their own computer and to give my team the pics.
*Originally posted by soap108 *
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Can you provide more technical details on the camera attachments for the visors?
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I’m going to try to remember as much as I can baout the Visors. If its not enough, let me know and I can check back at the shop once school reopens. Its called the Eye Module 2. The Eye Module 1 is only in black and white, but teh Eye Module 2 does alright. Cost is somewhere over $100, but I don’t think by all that much. As for quality, it depends on what you’re going for. To take pictures of robots for technical purposes, they do pretty well. You definitly have to hold the visor steady and there’s no zoom, but they do alright for the job (I would not want to buy one as my own personal digital camera). Saves pics in a jpg format and I’d say around 30ish fit on a Visor. Very short black and white video clips can also be taken, but other than having fun with friends we really didn’t find much use for them .
In general, I’ve been really happy with them. Synchronizing is still rather quick if you have a USB cradle for your visor. Any palm (USB or not) would take much much longer. Battery life is shorter with them, but I wouldn’t use that as a reason not to get one. Any more questions, just let me know.
~Tom Fairchild~, who at one point last year was wearing 5 different microprocessors.
p.s. Hope you have a Macintosh with Video-In Please, serious inqueries only. Thanks.
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