Jon Cardwell Red Alert Robotics Team 1741 October 24, 2014

Agenda  Why do Team Scouting?  Case Study: Team Red Alert  Red Alert Scouting Demonstration  Discussion / Q&A

Why do Team Scouting?  Gets the team members out meeting other teams to socialize.  A Great Opportunity to do Pit Scouting.  Collect opinions/observations/data on other teams and their skills and robots, etc.

Our Scouting history  We used paper forms, then moved to spreadsheets.  The spreadsheets got fancier, and custom macros / computed fields were added.  A Windows application with backend ms-access database was developed.  Data Synchronization issues arose, hard to compute overall team rankings for Alliance Selection.

Live Demonstration  Red Alert Developed a portable web/database scouting server.  Hardware: Raspberry PI-2, 32GB SD card, Netgear Travel WiFi Router, Panda BT4.0 nano-adapter, Li-Ion Battery, 8-port network switch.  Software: Raspbian LinuxOS (Debian Jessie), open-source packages including Apache/HTTP, MySQL, PHP.

Live Demonstration  Connect to our Server and take a look:  Use the WiFi SSID redalert-rpi (password=rar1741)  Connect to: Select a ‘Scouter’ from the drop-down and login.

MySQL Relational Database  MySQL Tables: Teams – a table of all Teams at an Event Match – a table of all Qualification Matches / Alliances; 3 teams each (red / blue) Scouter – a table of all Scouters using the application simultaneously. Team Statistics – all of the raw Qualification Matches data for each Team / match. Team Ranking Parameters Team Rankings – a computed table based on Team Statistics & Team Ranking Parameters.

Next Steps  Each new season (thus far): re-engineer the 'Team Stats' web-page  Re-Engineer the underlying MySQL “fact table”: Team Statistics to contain the raw data-points for the next FRC Challenge.  Stabilize support for Bluetooth PAN-IP (No WiFi hotspots in the stands).  Enable local web-storage for going offline, then re-connecting with BT.

 us:  Jon Cardwell  Nathan Coulombe:  Our Website: