insight

Pit display boards and other content for data gathering and scouting during matches

Features and objectives

Insight is a RoboEagles side project for displaying competition information in team pits in the FIRST Robotics Competition. It is designed to display only the most essential information to teams in a clearly readable format.

Design considerations

Insight is designed to operate in an offline environment; wireless communications of any kind in the pit and field areas are technically prohibited by game rules in all recent years. Although the enforcement of this rule is at the discretion of event and pit staff, the decision for Insight to work offline should allow for teams to act in good faith with respect to this rule.

Components

• ejs files are complete (page) or partial pieces of user-facing views, which the application renders and populates with data on request.
• index.js handles data parsing from a data.json file and renders the provided ejs templates with the necessary data
• bluealliancefetch.sh takes a Blue Alliance event key as an input and outputs JSON, which can be saved to data.json and read by Insight.

Installation

Dependencies

• node.js, which runs the backend data processing/page serving core
• jq, which bluealliancefetch.sh uses to parse API output from Blue Alliance

Project setup

1. Clone this repository and enter it.

git clone https://github.com/RoboEagles4828/insight && cd insight

2. Install necessary dependencies.

• With npm...

npm install

• or with yarn

npm install -g yarn # if not already installed
yarn install

3. Get data from Blue Alliance. Consider doing this step on a computer that has internet access and copying the resulting data.json file over. Note that with the move to the new Blue Alliance v3 API, an API key (free) must be obtained from Blue Alliance. If you need an API key, log into your TBA account and generate a new key in the account settings.

./bluealliancefetch.sh [event_name] [api_key] > data.json # e.g. ./bluealliancefetch.sh 2018ncgre > data.json

4. Launch server

npm start

The recommended combined next match/upcoming matches view is then visible at localhost:3000.

Contributing and next steps

• Enable config file support. Right now, team number, port numbers, and other environment variables are hard-coded as constants into scripts. Try storing this data in config files instead to make this code more useable by other teams.
• Make data refresh live. Previously, this was accomplished with some really clunky client-side code. Look into more streamlined mechanisms to update data in the page (or maybe just refresh the whole page altogether).