A Community Who Builds
We mentioned previously some resources available to teams that can be extremely useful during the competition season. This week we got in touch with one of the creators of a couple of said resources to get some more insight on what is available. Zachary Orr is a 6-year FIRST veteran studying Computer Science at the Western Michigan University. Here are some of his thoughts:
Hey FIRST LA! My name is Zachary Orr, and I was asked to do a guest post to talk about a few of the projects I’m working on for the FIRST community – FRC Miner and FRC Megaphone.
FRC Miner is a web service that takes the data provided by FIRST about team’s composite scores in individual parts of the game (auton, teleop, endgame) and shows them graphically. You can look at different regionals and start comparing robots based on individual aspects of the game, and unlike having a spreadsheet of numbers, it’s easy to start seeing groupings and pairings of teams from the graph. Giving this data the ability to be stacked and changed while you’re looking at it is an awesome tool to use if you’re not at a competition that weekend and you want to see how it stacks up, or alongside your scouting data.
FRC Megaphone is a service designed to notify team members/parents/fans about how your team is doing during a competition. You can sign up to get automated text messages with results after your favorite teams play matches, and connect your team’s Twitter account to tweet match results after your team finishes playing. As of recent, you can also get advanced notifications to know when a team is up soon, so you can watch them on the webcast. This functionality also works with Twitter, where Megaphone will tweet which match you will be playing in and include a link to the appropriate webcast for your followers.
You can find FRC Miner over at frcminer.com and FRC Megaphone at frcmega.com. Tweet me at (@FRCZach) and let me know if you sign up to get notifications using Megaphone or you like Miner’s graphs! Additionally, you can follow @FRCMiner and @FRCMega for status updates on both the sites.
Good luck during Week 4, FIRST LA, and enjoy Miner and Megaphone!
