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Aidan Hunt edited this page Jan 6, 2019 · 6 revisions

Welcome to the StrangeScout, created for the FIRST® community by your friends at ECG Robotics.

What is StrangeScout?

StrangeScout is the free-software scouting system for the FIRST Robotics Competition, a competitive robotics-based "sport of the mind" played by high school students worldwide. Scouting potential picks for playoffs proves complex due to the alliance-centric nature of FRC gameplay, so competitive teams must efficiently and accurately record team-level performance and capabilities data. The challenge doesn't end there—teams must prepare their alliance selection representative with easy-to-read, actionable data to quickly respond to an unpredictable selection environment. While robot performance may win a match, a quality scouting program defines a team by granting it the flexibility to launch into the playoffs with the best alliance possible—and the best chance for victory.

Enter StrangeScout and prepare to blast off from the days of paper scouting workflows that no one actually bothered to read. With StrangeScout, you don't need to stretch your budget on mobile hardware or worry about signal strength. Utilizing the power of the modern web, StrangeScout offers the flexibility of a BYOD, cross-platform solution that works on all five major operating systems with no installation, while empowering scouting anywhere in the venue with automagic data caching for later submission when connections are lost. Because StrangeScout uses standard web protocols, it can traverse locked-down guest wifi, mobile hotspots, and low bandwith connections with ease. Set high standards for quality with scouter names permanently attached to records, allowing you to identify the source of inaccurate data and monitor individual contributions.

When it's time to make your picks (this feature coming soon), StrangeScout shows you the stats that matter, team by team. We're talking high-level stats like average seconds per cycle and one-button sorts by scoring elements. As the field narrows, one finger removes picked teams from your valuable screen real estate while preserving their data. Did we mention you don't need WiFi for any of that? Once you activate "captain mode," all data for the event is cached on your device—because failure isn't an option when you're on the big screen in Houston.

As a result of the significant changes made to the FRC game each year, and to allow for the introduction of exciting new features, a completely new release of StrangeScout is made available for each season. This allows old versions and their data to coexist for as long as desired. After the release of the new season, no updates will be released to the current version. StrangeScout is currently being updated to support the newly released game, DESTINATION: DEEP SPACE. We will update this page when beta versions are available*

How do I use StrangeScout?

If your team is interested in using StrangeScout, have a look at the Administration and Planning Handbook. You can easily deploy StrangeScout at little to no cost in under an hour with basic Linux systems administration skills.

Your team can refer to the Scouting Operations Handbook for detailed guidance on efficiently scouting and creating actionable data views with the StrangeScout system.

Can y'all help me get set up or host this for me?

We will be happy to provide as-available volunteer support for StrangeScout. Please note that we make StrangeScout and it's source code available absolutely free, and as such it has absolutely no warranty or entitled support whatsoever. We may be able to host StrangeScout for teams that would be unable to host it on their own, but we would have limited capacity to do so. Please drop us a line via email with any questions.

Can I modify StrangeScout?

Absolutely! StrangeScout is licensed under the GNU AGPL License, so just make sure your modified code is publicly available. The StrangeScout web-based frontend is built using Angular, the backend API is written in Go, and a MariaDB (MySQL-compatible) database is used for data storage.

Check out our handbook for devs to get started hacking on StrangeScout! You're welcome to submit issues, PRs, and you're extra welcome to develop cool stuff that calls our API! We do welcome documentation contributions, but unfortunately GitHub Wikis don't support PR's so just submit an issue for now. Check out what we're working on now over at the Projects tab.

Thanks for checking our StrangeScout and best of luck this season!

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