For a second year in a row, we’re proud to say we, team 16818 Hype-Birds, will be going to the FIRST Championship this season. As we prepare for worlds, and now with the hindsight of the 2025 Championship, we know what we should expect from visiting an international event with at least 64 teams per division, scouting-wise.
Birdwatch is intended to fulfil the needs of scouts worldwide. From our experience and context, that’ll come from the point of view of Mexican teams, as we precisely started Birdwatch to empower our region to achieve their full potential in alliance with others. But that perspective is only one of many regions. This is why we’ve taken the mission to accommodate everything that any region might need. Perhaps in our perspective defensive isn’t that key in our region, but perhaps it could make a difference elsewhere.
To help with that push for additional scouting variables, we’ve integrated Defensive Power Rating into Birdwatch, to help teams have more information about a team’s defense, which is the primary focus of the latest update.
We do have plans of including more key features that could vastly improve the scouting scene, and we’re testing them out right now. But before we can do that, we are aiming to heavily optimize and speed up the delivery of information from Birdwatch to the user. The pit and field areas in the George R. Brown Convention Center are known to have slow internet connections, so our goal is to combat that for a smooth experience during worlds.
We hope that with this update, teams have more information to analyze and take highly informed decisions for successful outcomes. If there’s any suggestions as to what else we could add, you can do so through our feedback form. Happy scouting!
Hey everyone! Welcome to the first blog post for Birdwatch! In here we’ll be posting updates on the development process, including what we’ve done so far and what we’re planning on doing.
Birdwatch began development during the 2024-2025 Into The Deep season as a simple mobile and PC app to have quick statistics in your pocket. While that app was sufficient for basic scouting, we knew we needed to do more than that. During the end of that season, we had the privilege to participate in the 2025 Dive Championship, and we were able to evaluate what exactly we needed to enhance Birdwatch. Immediately after we got home, we began reworking Birdwatch as a much more advanced React website. With the benefit of a centralized server, we can process data and distribute that to every user in a much more efficient way. Unfortunately, we finished this version at the off-season period of Into The Deep.
The second we knew about the scoring details of Decode, we started working on this new version. Throughout the season so far, we’ve been polishing Birdwatch adding new features and making it more efficient. And now, we’re proud to announce that Birdwatch fully supports Decode, including its new particularities such as motif randomization and the new advancement system.
Here's some of the new features that this version brings:
The last two features are for helping teams scout in a more complete manner. An issue with Birdwatch and other scouting tools like it is that their core is tied to the raw scoring data provided by FIRST’s API. However, no matter how many variables you use from the API, you’ll never know if a team is using mecanum wheels or if they’re using an indexer for artifacts, unless you actually see their robot.
With match clips, we hope that users are now capable of seeing other teams’ robots in action, even if they missed a match or aren’t even present in the event. And with robot images, we hope that it provides a much closer look at robots, which before was only possible by visiting a team’s pit. The last feature depends heavily on pictures provided by the teams themselves, so if you want to help out and make your team’s page a little cooler, you can submit that here!
For now, we believe that Birdwatch is a complete tool ready to be used by everyone. However, there’s still things we’d like to get done in the future, such as:
There’s still work to be done, but for now we’re satisfied with what we can provide right now. As always, we hope that Birdwatch can be a tool your team can benefit from. Thanks for reading our blog and we hope to see you soon. Happy holidays!