Member News

As many of you know, this coming Saturday, we will be having our annual picnic. It will be from noon till 4PM. All returning members next year MUST come in at 11:30AM to help set up everything. Making...

On Tuesday, May 18th, we will be having a fundraiser at the new 5 Guys location on York rd. Between 6PM and 10PM, you order your food, and present our flyer (attached below) at the register. When you...

Atlanta Emergency Contacts

If you are going to the Atlanta Championship, you MUST fill out the emergency contact form attached below. At the very latest, you need to have the form given to Mr. Bruneau by Tuesday evening. It is ...

URGENT! Atlanta Transport/rooming fees!

This friday, March 26th, everyone who is going to Atlanta must pay thier $200 dues. If you have not done this or filled out the form for Bruneau, stating that you need finacial support from the club (...

URGENT: Event Travel Forms

Please download and fill out the Event Travel form as soon as possible! Club members are reminded that while all competitions are optional, the Chesapeake and DC regionals are local and free so most ...

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2009 Season Lunacy Update

With the unfortunate ban of Wi-Fi at all FIRST Events (see this PDF ) we have halted development of the Rex Scouting System in order to rethink our approach.

At previous competitions we relied on a paper based scouting system to track teams. This quickly escalated into a large binder full of papers that became difficult to search through and find useful data. For the 2008 competition season, we wanted a better way to scout. We developed a PHP and MySQL based system that uses laptops or any Wi-Fi enabled device to enter and retrieve data. This has allowed us to enter huge amounts of data and parse through it quickly, and has other benefits as well.

The system is run using server2go, a simple and lightweight Apache, MySQL and PHP enabled server. The system is primarily designed to run one one computer, with clients connecting via a Wi-Fi router. Alternatively, the server can be run locally on laptops, and can sync with a main server. This extends the usefulness of the system beyond the range of Wi-Fi.

The scouting system also includes a match prediction algorithm developed by team member Max Spector. This algorithm will assist in picking teams during the finals.

The system also includes a pit manager interface which shows a large countdown timer going to the next match, and all upcoming matches for a given team. (Set by ?team= in the URL) This allows anyone to connect and get specific countdowns and match information for their team. The interface also has a small fonts option, enabling viewing on small devices such as Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, Apple iPhone or iPod touches, and other Wi-Fi equipped devices. This expands the range of usable devices from just a laptop to any Wi-Fi enabled device with a functional web browser.

Demo Page

On the demo page you can view the public interface. This is what you would see if you logged onto our system at a regional. The data in the system is from the Philadelphia Regional. Countdown timers do not work correctly because the system uses dates for all matches.