Awww, I am an apple guy… XD
Is it set up now so the VEX Tournament Viewer is now completely offline? Or something else?
We’ll definitely consider implementing a mobile app in the future for our database, but for now we do have a simple mobile-friendly version of our site.
I’ll be sure to check out the app when I can finally get my hands on an ICS device. (iPhone user here too)
From what iAndr0idOs told me, I believe it fetches data from RobotEvents in real time.
I’m currently working on another large update that’ll allow the app to work offline. It’ll be released in a couple days or a couple of hours, depending on how productive I feel.
Great work, my teams will be adding this to our list of scouting sites/apps that they will be using at worlds.
There does appear to be an issue with some missing data, however. It appears that the data for some competitions is not included. This may be for competitions that had multiple divisions but only included data for one division…this is just a guess though. I brought up the results for team 323A. The Awards section correctly shows 323A as the Tournament Champion for the Vex Robotics Midwest Championship Sack Attack Qualifier Tournament, however Vex Robotics Midwest Championship Sack Attack Qualifier Tournament is not included in the Tournament History section.
Jay
Thanks for letting us know! Unfortunately, the script that we wrote to collect all .csv files doesn’t work properly for events with more than one division. We have to download those files and update them on the server manually (like we did for Nationals).
We’ll be sure to update the data for this event this weekend. Please let us know if there are any other multi-division events from this season so we can add them in before Worlds!
I was just using it, and it includes last year’s worlds in its data.
Yep! We did that on purpose so that we could see which teams performed well at Worlds last year. Obviously team members may have changed, but it’s useful to get a general idea of how good the organization is.
Hello again everyone!
We’ve made a few minor updates for Worlds since we initially released the database. The first minor change is the addition of a “division” section to the data shown for teams attending Worlds. When looking at a specific team page, the team’s Worlds 2013 division will now be displayed under the other team information.
Our second, and more exciting, update is the addition of Match Performance at Worlds. This section, which has been added to the top, will show how a specific team has performed in their matches at the event. The sample data in the image below is from the CA State Championship. Once they begin posting data on RobotEvents for Worlds Matches, data will be updated from all five divisions every 1-2 minutes.
Image URL: http://i.imgur.com/WpDgFuh.png
We’re in Anaheim right now and look forward to working with and meeting you guys in the Arts (5327A) and Math (5327C) divisions!
First off, thanks to all of you who came to our table at Worlds and complimented us on our database. It was great to see a lot of teams, even ones we have never met, using our database to make scouting easier. We really spent a lot of time making this, and your thanks are appreciated.
We finished this database just in time for Worlds, but we want to expand it a lot for next year. What improvements would you like to see? How can we make scouting as convenient as possible for all teams who use our database? Here are some ideas we’ve been tossing around:
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Live tournament data updates for all tournaments and teams attending them. Basically, when a tournament schedule is put on RobotEvents, we put all of the matches the team is in (and results) on that team’s page the day of the tournament. We did this for Worlds, but we think it would be useful to do for all tournaments (and we hope to improve it).
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Individual match scouting. Rearrange all of the information we have on the team pages to a page where you can compare the four teams in a match. We would put up the match schedule for a team, then you would be able to click on a match and see the four teams and their info.
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Other forms of rank such as OPR, CCWM, etc.
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All programming and driver skills data for each team. Tournament pages may also display the top 5 skills runs and skills winners.
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Personal pit and match scouting information storage. We currently have a personal scouting system with this database for our club to use. Scouts log in and enter information that they have for each team at a tournament. All scouts’ information is shown on the team pages when we search them, so in addition to what the rest of the world can see, we have additional information that our scouts have entered. If people are interested, we can expand this system to multiple accounts, so your team can log in and store your own personal scouting information, then have it shown when you search a team. We plan to store information securely so people who work on the database can’t view other teams’ data.
These are just a few ideas we’ve had for improving our scouting system. Please give us your opinion on these ideas and feel free to post any improvements you would like to see.
Thanks for releasing this database. This work is definitely one of the best data-mining efforts from the robotics community.
these would be neat and helpful to teams, especially to give teams an idea of skills score and team’s previous results at other events.
OPR is a neat way to rank teams if the game has no descoring. Typically VEX games are a bit difficult to measure by OPR because of descoring, CCWM would be interesting to look at
this would be very useful. Robotevents only publishes top 250 skills scores, which made ranking teams difficult that did not make the top 250 scores.
This will be useful at large tournaments.
Here are a couple ideas,
A. a way to upload a picture of a robot
B. A way to rank teams at a particular event by all previous skill scores (i.e. ranking teams at worlds by their past skill scores)
C. An API for teams to grab data from your database
Thanks! We really put a lot of work into it over spring break, and we will work very hard to implement all those other changes over the summer.
In our club’s members-only section, we actually do already have a picture-uploading option in place. Expanding this to the public is entirely possible, although it comes with a few thorny issues. As much as we know how honest and sportsmanlike the VEX community is, we wouldn’t want people publicly uploading photos of other teams’ robots without their permission, nor would we want people defacing teams’ pages with irrelevant pictures. If we can figure out some way to prevent these issues, we could definitely implement this.
Thanks for your input! We will definitely consider these features as well.
Great job at Worlds, by the way! It was quite a challenge to face your Z team in the Math division. 
If you were to create an option for us at teams to create a sort of profile for our robot and upload a picture as well as provide a short text statement about the robot that might be useful for others. I wouldn’t mind making the jobs of everyone’s scouting teams a little bit easier.
Great work on this, by the way. I know I said this at Worlds, but thanks. I (and the rest of our team) was really impressed.
Thanks for the suggestion! It was great meeting you and your team at the PLTW event on Wednesday evening.
We’ll definitely consider implementing this feature in a future release, given that we can figure out how to verify that submissions are from actual team members.
One idea is that you have to upload 2 pictures.
Picture X would be of the robot only.
Picture Y would be of the robot with a team member who has a team shirt on, and holding a sign that says, “I allow the 5727 scouting database to upload my robot picture”.
Then picture X would be uploaded…
Pros:
Picture Y would be almost impossible to fake, and would be required.
[All pros that go with people being able to see your bot…]
Cons:
-Time sorting through pictures
-Picture Y could be done by a team member w/o team’s approval. (IMO this is unavoidable.)
[All cons that go with people being able to see your bot…]
Thoughts?
The way I see it, once your robot has competed in a competition it is fair game. I can’t count the number of photographs that have been taken of our robot, and I am sure most teams have had even more pictures taken of theirs. We have not ever had enough spare time at events to go around and take pictures since we are a 1 student team, but my opinion is that if you don’t want somebody to take pictures or video of your robot then leave it at home. If it’s that top secret it belongs in area 51 and not at a VRC event!
Eh, I disagree. If you have a REALLY good design idea and ask people not to post it online, I understand and will absolutely do that for you. I’m still going to find a way to beat it, but I’ll respect if you don’t want everyone across the world doing the same. Sometimes, surprise is what wins matches.
I see several ways of how to incorporate pictures into our scouting database:
Option 1. Anyone can submit pictures for any team.
Option 2. Team Profiles, as Ephemeral_Being suggested. This would probably be linked to a personal scouting account so that you can only upload a photo of your own robot when you are logged into the account associated with your team number.
Option 3. Pictures within your personal scouting account that only you can see. This would be the same as we have for our Gael Force account - we uploaded pictures of robots, but only we can see them. This would be the same for others accounts.
Like everything else in this database, we want this picture system to be as fast, dependable, useful, and automatic as possible.
Option 1 presents the problem of teams uploading pictures that are unwanted, either because the team wants to keep their robot a secret or because the photo is inaccurate (or totally irrelevant). In addition, robots change throughout the year, so a picture from October that is not updated would no longer be accurate or useful.
There are several ways to solve these problems: we could make a photo-approval system (either manual or automatic). One idea is to only approve photos of a robot with its corresponding ID plate attached. We could also make a photo-expiration system, so a photo only shows for one month (or some other amount of time) before it is taken down. We would still need to come up with a system to make sure the robot’s team approves of the photo. The robot is, after all, their property, and pictures of it probably shouldn’t be put publicly online without their approval.
Option two would probably be easier, but the downside is that only members of the team can upload pictures of their robot, meaning there would be not nearly as many pictures in the database. The only robots with a picture (and possibly profile information) would be from the teams who have accounts on our website. So unless a lot teams at any one competition use our system, it may not be useful.
Option three is probably the easiest, at least from our end (meaning making the website). All pictures would be a part of your personal account, so only people with your username and password can view the pictures you have uploaded for the teams you compete against. The problem is, you would have to take pictures of each those teams, which may be disadvantageous for smaller teams.
So I would say that option 3 is absolutely possible and relatively easy to implement. Option 2 is also possible - perhaps we could do a combination of 1 and 2. I do admit though, Option 1 would be the coolest. If we can find a way to eliminate the issues that come with it, it would be an awesome addition to the scouting system.
Once again, thank you for the ideas and suggestions. We want to make our database as useful as possible for you all.