FRC Tracker - Guided Tour

FRC Tracker Guided Tour

Events

See a complete list of all 49 events: regionals worldwide and also the Michigan state district events.

For each event, see info about the event:

Teams the list of participating teams.

Schedule the schedule of matches.

Match Results the same as the schedule, but only showing completed matches with the most recent at the top of the list.

Rankings the list of teams sort by official qualifying rank (or our best approximation if current FIRST data isn't available), offensive power rating or defensive power rating.

Awards the list of awards and recipients.

Get Team Photos download team robot photos from The Blue Alliance.

Tapping the Rankings item in the event detail view will show you the teams sorted by various criteria.

Rank If the offical event ranking data is available, teams can be sorted by that, otherwise an approximate ranking is computed based on match scores. There are many ways this calculated rank will different from the official rank, such as scoring or penalty changes after the match is tweeted, red cards, and no shows. If the rank is calculated, the label on the control changes to "~ Rank".

OPR stands for Offensive Power Rating. It's a mathematical calculation which attempts to estimate how much each team contributes to their alliance scores. The idea is to model the qualifying matches with the assumption that every team has a fixed number of net points that it contributes to their alliance every match. With that assumption, figure out that value each team would have to contribute to make the scores work out the way they did. This is a wildly wrong assumption, so the results are to be taken with a lot of skepticism, but OPR value can help you find teams that are ranked above or below what they really contribute to their alliance.

DPR stands for Defensive Power Rating. It's similar to OPR, but starting with the assumption that every team allows a fixed number of net point for the opposition alliance. This may be useful in identifying teams that are stronger or weaker at defence than their rank suggests.

Note: OPR and DPR can't be calculated until there have been as many matches as there are teams at the event. So, if there are 40 teams at an event, you won't see OPR/DPR values until 40 qualifying matches have been played.

Note on Scouting: These ranking values are no substitute for real scouting. Successful teams will have members in the stands recording information about each robot's performance in every match. Teams should have at least one member with a solid understand of The Game per robot plus at least one more to keep everything organized. A summary of that information is what your team captain will need if you make it into the top eight and need to choose alliance partners.

While you can download photos for individual teams from the team detail view, you will probably want to get photos for all of the teams at the regional you're attending. Tapping on the "Get Team Photos" item from the event detail view (see above) will bring you here to download all of the team photos available on The Blue Alliance for that regional.

To download the photos, tap Start.

If you only want to download photos that have been added since your last download, leave "Reload all photos" OFF. If you want to replace all of your old photos with potentially new versions, change it to ON. We want to be nice to the TBA folks, so don't turn on reload too often.

Teams

See a complete list of all 1,677 teams registered for 2009 events, including team number, location and rookie year. The team list will show team nicknames when available from The Blue Alliance, otherwise it shows the first few words of the full team name / sponsor list.

Tap on a team to get more information.

For teams that have robot photos, a small thumbnail will appear to the right. Tap on that thumbnail to see the full photo.

As the list of teams is quite long, the search bar can narrow the list by matching the team number, location, or name/sponsors.

The team information shows the location and rookie year. A list of the team's registered events is shown, tap on one to see a list of that team's matches at that event.

To see the team's official name and list of sponsors, tap on the first item.

For each registered event, the name of the event is shown, along with the team's record, qualifying rank and elimination level (if available) or the event dates (if no results are yet available).

If more qualifying matches have been played since the official ranking data was downloaded, the win/loss/tie record is updated and the ranking data is removed. (There's not enough data on the Twitter feed to be able to calculate the ranking correctly.)

Disclaimer Even the win/loss record can be incorrect when calculated from the Twitter match result feed, due to surrogate matches and DQ's.

After the team's event list, a list of any awards won by the team will be shown, once official results for the relevant events are available.

Tapping on the thumbnail for a team will bring up the team photo. You can also see the photo by tapping on the "Photo" item in the team detail view.

You can view photos for other teams by sliding the photo up or down.

Tap the edit button to add, update or delete a photo. You'll get a list of possible actions.

Update from TBA will download the current robot photo from The Blue Alliance. If a team doesn't have a photo there, encourage them to add one!

You can also assign a photo to a team from your photo library.

If your device has a built-in camera, you can take a photo and add it directly. Note If you add a team photo directly from the camera without storing it in your photo library first, then if you ever delete FRC Tracker, you'll lose that photo.

Hint If you want to check The Blue Alliance for photos for all of the teams at your regional event, go to that event's detail view and select Get Team Photos.

Be sure to check out the hints page on how to get the best results for your team's photo in FRC Tracker.

Matches

Note Match results are taken from the frcfms Twitter feed. These results are unofficial and generally don't reflect changes to the final outcome that result from replays due to field errors or scoring/penalty changes that may occur after the match results are committed.

After the official results for an event are posted on FIRST's web site, those results will be processed (approximately once per day during events) and made available via the "Update Event Info" option on the Tools tab. Official match results are then merged with the unofficial (but more detailed) Twitter match results.

To the left is an example of the Match Results view for an event. Note that the winning alliance is marked with a diamond in the winning alliance's color.

If you tap on a regional from a team's detail view, you'll get only the matches that team played, that team's number will appear in bold in each match, and the match will show W, L or T for win, loss or tie, respectively. This makes it easy to scan the qualifying and elimination matches to see how a team did.

When results for a match aren't known, the scheduled time for the match is shown.

Note that the the display is different from the Event's full match list. Instead of marking the winning alliance with a diamond, the focus team's alliance is marked with W, L, or T for win, loss or tie, respectively.

The match detail view shows info about the teams involved in the match, including their win/loss/tie record and ranking data (when official data is available and current).

As experienced teams know, record and ranking are no substitute for informed scouting data, but this is handy for giving remote spectators some idea of what to expect from upcoming matches.

Getting Updates

To get match updates, go to the Tools tab. There you can manually check the frcfms Twitter feed for match updates, or set FRC Tracker to automatically check for updates.

When set on automatic, FRC Tracker will check the frcfms Twitter feed each time the app is started and then approximately once every 15 minutes while the app is awake. Note that this can eat up your battery charge, especially if you're at an event in a dome and have poor cell reception. We recommend leaving the updates on manual and checking for updates periodically.

At the end of each day of competition, after offical events results are available from FIRST's web site, updated event info will be made available via "Update Event Info." Be sure to tap the "Now" button for the event update at least once per day, either late in the evening after the competition or early the next morning. Note: there may be a delay between when official results appear on FIRST's site and when they will be available to FRC Tracker.

Tip: We recommend that for the first time you update, and any time more than one day of events have happened since you last updated, that you do so over WiFi as it can be pretty slow over the cellular network, especially over EDGE.